I saw an article in the New York Times (Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality; 2006 July 13) that detailed a controversy broiling for some American history textbooks. It seems that, in describing the 9/11 attacks, the books A History of the United States and America: Pathways to the Present use virtually identical language. Apparently several other sets of passages dealing with recent history are also substantially the same.
However, the scandal is not what you think.
This is not a case of one dishonest scholar copying from another to, say, beat a deadline. The people whose names are on the books claim not to have copied anything, and that may well be true. For you see, the textbook publishing industry has many dirty little secrets, and this is one: Quite often, the bulk of a book is written by uncredited authors who go to work once the named author hands in a manuscript. The named author is there, at least sometimes, for credentialing and cachet, not for actual contribution to the book.
This tendency seems to get worse as the book goes through multiple editions. For an extreme case, apparently one textbook was issued in new editions under the name of the original authors — one of whom was long dead and the other long retired and in a nursing home.
It is no secret in the world of education that American textbooks, on the whole, stink — especially at the high school level or lower. Too much is covered but, paradoxically, not enough is said. Textbooks emphasize memorization of facts and undermine a thematic synthetic approach to knowledge. Textbooks reinforce an authority-driven view of education and of the world, pretending that there is one right answer that the whole class — indeed, the whole world — should agree on.
Now we find that these defects also include intellectual dishonesty: An attempt to pass off work by one person as work by another. More than that, the named authors interviewed all admitted that later editions of their books — still under their names — were released with considerably lower involvement or oversight. Textbooks are lousy, in part, because those who cared most to write them apparently don’t care so much about updating them. I have a karmic view of education and believe that this kind of intellectual sloppiness must dribble down and influence the students who use those books, even if the transfer is entirely unconscious.
Here’s my part: I hereby pledge that if and when my high school physics textbook (the infamous Great American Physics Textbook) is published, I will retain such rights as to ensure that only I can edit new editions. If a publisher insists on the usual soul-sucking rights, I’ll pass on having it published. (God bless the free Internet!)
Now I just need to write the darned thing…
🙂
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.