(2005-02-09) Textbook Publishing

Tamim Ansary's horrible look into Text-Book Book Publishing. They are processed into existence using the pulp of what already exists, rising like swamp things from the compost of the past. The mulch is turned and tended by many layers of editors who scrub it of anything possibly objectionable before it is fed into a government-run "adoption" system that provides mediocre material to students of all ages... My assignment was to reduce a stack of pages 17 inches high, supplied by 40 writers, to a 3-inch stack that would sound as if it had all come from one source. The original text was just ore. A few of the original words survived, I suppose, but no whole sentences... Adoption states, by contrast, buy new textbooks on a regular cycle, usually every six years, and they allow only certain programs to be sold in their state... Among the adoption states, Texas, California, and Florida have unrivaled clout... In that elite trio, Texas rules... In the late '60s a Texas couple, Mel and Norma Gabler, figured out how to use their state's adoption hearings to put pressure on textbook publishers. The Gablers had no academic credentials or teaching background, but they knew what they wanted taught--PhonIcs, Sexual Abstinence, free enterprise, Creationism, and the primacy of Judeo-Christian values--and considered themselves in a battle against a "PoliticallyCorrect degradation of academics."