This spring, Nazlian heard popular conservative commentator Glenn Beck and a panel of teachers and parents criticizing the book “Social Studies Alive!: Our Community and Beyond,” which her daughter was using in her third-grade class in St. Charles Unit District 303.
Well, if Beck is against this textbook, I automatically want to order it for my students.
For example, she said, the book talks about how other countries have government-run health care and childcare and she feels it paints a positive picture without discussing any of the drawbacks.
Oh no! It mentions that other countries have different health-care systems!
You guys, this article, I just can’t. I just can’t.
What I’m concerned about here is that this book talks about other countries. Why the hell is it talking about other countries when the only thing students need to learn about is how the United States of God is the best ever because the Constitution specifically says only heterosexual white Christian capitalists with real property are allowed to vote, as also stated by Rush Limbaugh in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence (signed in 1492), right next to the part about guns and how there needs to be a gigantic wall and landmines between the US and Mexico.
The terrible part of this? There’s an incredible conservative bias in textbooks because textbook publishers bend over backward to appease conservative school boards. (One of the problems in textbook publishing today is that the biggest market is Texas, and Texas’s school board has an insane list of requirements, which means a lot of books are written to Texas’s standards first and then customized for the rest of the country second, which means some of Texas’s more problematic requirements are finding their way into books sold in other states.) I hate that the article is ambiguous, but is this woman really just objecting to the fact that other systems of health care are mentioned?
(Ten years as a textbook editor talking here.)
