Education: Showdown in Texas

Schoolbooks become a political battleground

Textbook content shall promote citizenship and the understanding of the free-enterprise system, emphasize patriotism and respect for recognized authority . . . Textbook content shall not encourage lifestyles deviating from generally accepted standards of society. —Proclamation of the Texas state board of education, 1982

It is textbook-selection time in Texas, an annual debate between special interest groups over what students should read in public classrooms. In Austin last week, concerned citizens and publishers jammed the weeklong state textbook committee hearings to criticize publishers' interpretations of sensitive subjects such as civics, health and homemaking, and to promote their own.

The most powerful petitioner was Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas. Gabler and her husband Mel, a retired clerk for Exxon, have spent some 20 years scrutinizing text books for political bias, moral lapses and erosion of traditional values. The Gablers have regularly influenced the Texas board of education to drop texts that they consider too liberal, and in doing so have won the public admiration of such New Right leaders as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly. But at this year's hearings, a new organization took on the Gablers: People for the American Way, a group founded by Television Producer Norman Lear and others to fight for First Amendment causes.

People for the American Way (PFAW) picked the forum for a showdown over texts because Texas, as the nation's second largest purchaser of schoolbooks ($60 million this year), sets a tone for books throughout the U.S. by influencing how publishers tailor their texts. Says Barbara Parker, head of PFAW's National Schools and Libraries Project: "Censorship activity is so well organized that the only way to combat it is through an equal amount of organization. If 93% of a community doesn't want The Catcher in the Rye, that's O.K. That's a community decision. My disagreement is that in education today things are being run by vocal control, not local control." Snaps Norma Gabler: "It's a double standard. Those liberal elements have controlled the minds of our children for years. If parents bring things up, it's censorship. If they do it, it's not."

Gabler arrived at the hearings with two aides from her nonprofit Educational Research Analysts organization and 600 pages of detailed objections to publishers' offerings. In a fourth-grade text by McDougal, Littell & Co., the Gablers objected to a paragraph listing beneficial qualities of drugs like insulin for diabetes on the grounds that such information "is instilling in student minds that the term drugs refers to a beneficial product." In a junior high health text by Ginn & Co., the Gablers took exception to a chapter titled "When Things go Wrong." Their demand: a positive chapter called "When Things Go Right."