CENSORSHIP: EVIDENCE OF BIAS IN OUR CHILDREN'S TEXTBOOKS
Paul C. Vitz
Ann Arbor, Michigan: Servant Books, 1986
142 pp., $5.95
The strangest underground classic of the 1980s is the set of McGuffey's Readers reprinted from editions that came out in the mid-nineteenth century. One might have thought that in more than a hundred years, teachers, writers, and editors must have learned a thing or two about writing textbooks. They have, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Paul Vitz for showing us precisely what it is that the professionals are teaching American children in basic readers and social studies books.
While McGuffey's Readers were explicitly Christian and emphasized the importance of family life, hard work, patriotism, and moral responsibility, current texts set a somewhat different tone. After surveying 60 social studies textbooks at all levels and 670 stories and articles from elementary school reading books, Vitz concluded that public school textbooks were both biased and censored: "The nature of the bias is clear: Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks."
Rather than relying on subjective impressions, Vitz diligently scrutinized the books - text and pictures - for any reference to religion, marriage, or business and tallied the results. He then had his work cross-checked by researchers at Educational Products Information Exchange, an organization with no known ties to any religious body or conservative group. The sample is more than just representative. The books Vitz studied include 100 percent of the textbooks on the adoption list of Texas and California and somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 percent of all the textbooks currently in use in the nation's public schools.
The result is a study that is hard to ignore. Vitz has appeared on panel after panel about education, and his research has been reviewed in such different forums as National Review and National Public Radio. But if the general findings are provocative, the details are hair-raising.
Writing Religion out of American History
Along with Poland and Ireland, the United States is probably the most religious country in what used to be known as Christendom. In poll after poll, an overwhelming majority of Americans confess to a belief in God and the Devil, heaven and hell. Half of them can be found in church at least once a month. As strong as it is today, American religiosity in the 1980s is far less pronounced than it was in earlier times - among early New England Puritans, South Carolina Anglicans, and Huguenots, or in the period of the great Awakening. It is obviously impossible to form any reasonable conception of American history if the role of religion is ignored, yet that is precisely the case with all of the social studies textbooks commonly in use.
Of course, religion is not entirely banished. There are scattered references to the Pilgrims or Spanish missions in the Southwest. However, in fifth-grade U.S. history textbooks, "the treatment of the past 100 or 200 years is so devoid of reference to religion as
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