Texas, Education And Textbooks
For decades now, the state of Texas has exercised enormous influence on the textbooks used in elementary and high schools throughout the nation. It has done so through the state Board of Education, which must approve all textbooks used in the state. The size of the Texas market (and that of California, which carries a similar weight) has made it an irresistibly powerful tail, wagging the editorial process that has traditionally produced the materials from which children learn (or don’t) in schools. If Texas wants it, it goes in, and everybody gets it; if Texas doesn’t want it, nobody gets it. That is the logic of the market and of the economics of printed books.
The scramble to get books approved in Texas has not necessarily brought forth publishers’ best efforts. Some 30 years ago, I recall, the board was considering dictionaries for use in high schools. There were two candidates, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and one whose name has happily escaped me. Both were found, upon examination, to contain the dreaded f-word. The board demanded that it be removed, perhaps fearing that if there should, by any chance, be a high school student somewhere in the state who had not before encountered that word, he or (I suppose more likely) she might suffer some sort of psychological deflowering upon seeing it there on the page, in seven-point type, between fuchsin, a kind of dye, and fucoid, a type of seaweed.
The nameless publisher evidently calculated that he could have the page reset, filling the space freed up by the deletion, and deliver a new press run at a bearable cost. He agreed to the board’s demand. Merriam’s president refused. As it happened, the board then had a rule that two alternatives must be approved (so that schools would have a choice of dictionary) or none. (Readers may recognize the situation as a variation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma.) The one publisher’s pusillanimity availed him naught, while the other was able to stymie his competitor and walk away with something that looked rather like honor.
In those days the Texas board’s public hearings were often dominated by a pair of dedicated amateur critics, Mel and Norma Gabler. Their reviews of textbooks were a good