Teaching Comparative

Ah, the textbook business

James Lowen (at left in photo to the right) has been at it again. Telling us that high school textbooks are less than stellar sources of good writing and scholarship. Our students know this if they have read and thought about what they've read. Have enough high school teachers read the books they assign to their students to know that too?

Luckily, most comparative politics textbooks are more reliable than the mass market high school texts.


However, Gabriel Almond's (shown at left) name still appears on the textbook he helped write long, long ago even though he died in 2002. His co-author Powell is still alive and actively teaching. He has a number of co-authors credited on the cover and the authors of individual chapters are clearly noted.

On the secondary textbook side, you don't think that Mr. (Dr.?) Magruder of Magruder's American Government is still around, do you? That book had been around a long time when I started teaching in the '60s. The newest edition of that franchaise is credited to William A. McClenaghan and sells for $94.40 at Amazon.com. Wish I did as well with my self-published book as the 10-15% authors like McClenaghan are reported to get.

Then, in this New York Times article, one of the lead authors tells us that authorship is not a big deal since these books aren't classic literature. That's for sure. Canterbury Tales is easier to read than many high school history textbooks.


Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality

"Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have a hand in the books and their frequent revisions...

"The industry is replete with examples of the phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history texts is Holt the American Nation, first published in 1950 as Rise of the American Nation and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.

"Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that the original authors had supplied the structure of the book that carries his name. But he said that as he revises the text, he adds new scholarship, themes and interpretations. He defended the disappearance of the original authors’ names from the book, saying it would be more misleading to carry their names when they had no say in current editions.

“'Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad or Beowulf,' he added...

“'This is really about an awkward and embarrassing situation these authors have been put in because they’ve got involved in textbook publishing,' [said] William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin who wrote the American Historical Association’s statement on ethics...

"Named authors share royalties, generally 10 to 15 percent of the net profits, on each printing of the text, whether they write it or not...

"The similarities in the Prentice Hall books were discovered by James W. Loewen, who is updating his 1995 best seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:30 AM