Why wasn’t this in my textbook?
I remember how exciting it was, in grade school, to discover that many of the math questions assigned in our textbook had the answers printed in the back. Our homework’s already done! Even though I was still expected to show how I got to the solution, it felt less scary knowing the right answer; all I had to do was get there.
That sense of comfort in the textbook came full circle for me as a grad student, when I worked part-time as an editor developing middle-school math textbooks. I’d tell my assistants that the answers section in the back was the worst place for a typo or simple calculation error to sneak past our editing eyes. If students get an answer that doesn’t match what the book says, they probably won’t question the text; instead they’ll doubt themselves. An accidental keystroke in the wrong place, switching a couple of digits, even a bad line break that obscures a negative sign — any of these can kick off a cycle of self-doubt and frustration that won’t simply go away if the error is discovered.
Even in subjects more obviously subjective than mathematics, textbooks make lasting impressions on how people understand what a discipline is about and what its basic facts and important questions are. They’re so impactful that “textbook” has become a textbook case of a word becoming used more often as a metaphor than in reference to the actual object it symbolizes.
So it’s in both the metaphorical and more literal sense that I have heard history students ask: “Why wasn’t this in my textbook?”
They mean: Why is the history I’m learning in university so different from what I’d been taught before? How can your narrative — your interpretation — be right, if it goes against the textbook history I studied in order to make it this far? Why didn’t I already know about the things you’re telling me?
Among students in the U.S., there are two different spirits in which this question is usually asked. One is an anticipatory skepticism of “revisionist history,” a scare term that suggests that the kind of history they’re about to be presented with is distorted, “revised” to fit some political or ideological perspective. The question is a sometimes-hostile challenge to the instructor, invoking stereotypes about liberal academia and the corrupting effects of higher education on upstanding young minds.
The other way that this question comes up is in the Lies My Teacher Told Me model. In that 1995 book (and subsequent updated editions), sociologist James Loewen analyzed several high-school U.S. history textbooks, finding them both dull and propagandistic. Many students are drawn to Loewen’s brand of iconoclasm, rebelling against a system that seeks to control its youth in the name of their protection.1
Although these two versions of “Why wasn’t this in my textbook” seem diametrically opposed to each other, both come from a shared idea of what history is and ought to be. The argument that “revisionist history” is biased only has weight if textbook history is supposed to be unbiased. Conversely, dismissing textbook history as self-serving “lies” suggests that, if it weren’t for the powers that be, textbooks would be morally neutral compilations of facts. In both versions of this question, the assumption is that there’s a pure history out there somewhere, perhaps with answers in the appendix.
Of course, this ideal textbook does not exist, and has never existed. The idea that politics influences textbooks shouldn’t surprise anyone. Especially not in the United States right now, with dozens of states and countless local school boards trying to dictate how systemic racism and other issues can be taught. But we should not only focus on the inside of textbooks — the words and images that form their content, the curriculum standards they are aligned to. We must also examine the politics that govern the outside of the textbook.2
The textbook is a physical object. It is produced, shipped, distributed, and owned. It costs money. It endures for a limited time. A network of people — not just authors and teachers, but printers, sales agents, state regulators, and retailers — are necessary to support that process. And that process has been deeply political from the start.
The late nineteenth century saw many examples of textbook salesmen bribing school board members, temporarily flooding local markets with below-cost books to drive competitors out of business, colluding to change book adoptions every year to prevent reuse and drum up sales, arranging kickback schemes in exchange for exclusive adoptions, and so on. After decades of the textbook industry claiming (and failing) to regulate itself, two major shifts occurred in the 1890s. Several of the largest companies merged to form a single conglomerate, the American Book Company, which immediately represented over 80% of K-12 U.S. textbook sales. Also, Congress enacted the International Copyright Act, which prevented publishers from relying on pirated British texts and forced them to invest more seriously in content creation. Making a virtue of necessity, sales agents immediately began equating the newness of content with a book being up-to-date, a new basis on which to claim superiority over a rival’s books, and to justify the need for frequent new adoptions that prevented book reuse.
This is where the tension between the inside and outside of the textbook emerged. Even as accusations of monopoly and anticompetitive practices hounded the ABC, the federal government largely ignored the textbook industry from a business perspective and left it, as an educational issue, to be handled at the state level. As progressive education reformers pushed for widening access to public schools, there was a related “free book” movement that encouraged states or school boards to purchase books instead of passing the cost along to students. In several states, especially across the U.S. South and West, one remedy to counter corruption and uncontrolled prices was statewide adoption, typically in five-year cycles. The state took over control of textbooks from local school boards not because it wanted to exert authority over content, but because it was politically and economically more sound to regulate textbooks as objects.
This is where the Platonic textbook ideal emerged. It was a tacit marketing strategy that shifted fights over sales away from academic content and over to the physical manifestation of textbooks. This was a fight that sales agents felt more competent to engage in. And in their vitriolic competition, they colluded to make textbooks seem above the vagaries of politics. They used their leverage to make it seem as though content questions were apolitical.
But almost immediately, state adoption agencies had to make decisions about content, which exposed deep political tensions. The general attitude from textbook publishers was that milquetoast sold the most — that politically conservative school regulators were conflict-averse, so it made more sense to sell something that would not seem to force the issue. When controversies over the American Civil War or the theory of evolution flared up, it was safest for textbook companies to resort to the claim they had convinced everyone was a truism: that textbooks were in themselves apolitical.
That mythology has persisted through decades of on-and-off conflict over K-12 education. Even as culture-war partisans decry specific textbooks, they find it useful to imagine a world so aligned with their values that they can proclaim it free of “politics.” It’s a textbook example of non-stalgia: a sentimentality for a past that never actually existed, outside of their history textbooks.
- James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995).
- For more on this and what follows, see Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Vintage, 2004); and Joseph Moreau, Schoolbook Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
