Political Censorship: A Different View

Extract

The 1988 Winter PS contained five essays on textbook censorship. Though they covered a wide variety of topics, they shared a common and very familiar theme. Basically, in one form or another, they depicted and deplored right wing attempts to shape textbooks content and school adoption. O'Connor and Ivers, for example, described the fundamentalist attack on evolution and its advocacy of creationism. Adler discusses how the liberal People For the American Way had led the “counterattack” against organizations such as the Educational Research Analysts, a Texas based group worried about the lack of moral absolutes in sociology textbooks.

To anyone acquainted with intellectual censorship, these tales are yet additional items to be added to thousands just like them. Indeed, there is such regularity to these stories that one might even formulate a near-universal generic school textbook censorship story: truth-seeking textbook author rejected by established publishers as too “controversial” eventually gets book into print but fails anyway due to pressure from intimidating right-wingers cloaked in the mantle of traditional American values. Intolerant jingoism again defeats truth.

These PS articles no doubt paint an accurate picture of political pressure on textbooks. But, they present only a part of the story. They tell us nothing about the pressures on the textbook writer, pressures quite different than the familiar right wing “truth squads” hounding moral relativism from subversive tracts. As one who has written a text-Understanding American Government (Random House)—with separate college and high school editions, I have some experiences in this matter.