This is all good stuff. The way it works in
California is as follows (I
would assume it's similar in most of the other large
states):
1) after a publisher readies a book, it has to pass
a textbook committee
review to make sure that it conforms to the
frameworks.
2) Once a book has been approved, it's available for
any district to adopt.
The districts have their various curriculum experts,
teachers, interested
parents, etc. determine what's the best fit for the
district. btw, it's more
complex at K-5 [elementary school], where amorphous
'topics' like 'language
development' take on the flavor of entire integrated
programs, and are more
complex, (but ideally suited to open content
development).
So, this is one way it gets interesting is with open
content developed in
modular format via Wikipedia. It turns out that
many, many excellent
teachers have developed very good materials on their
own over the years.
Often, this material is published by a district, and
distributed to all the
schools in that district.
If a specific book is published via Wikipedia to
adhere to standards, once
the content is approved at state level, various
districts could either
self-publish, or request that a commercial publisher
include those teacher
materials specific to the district that had been
published by Wikipedia.
This would save time, money, and other resources -
not to mention the
benefit that(again, I would start with one
(recommending California), and
migrate to many...in fact, eventually, one could tag
various modules within
a 'book' as specific to one or another state, and go
from there).
This is just one advantage of the modular approach,
from a practical
'on-the-ground' approach. There are many others.
Sanford
That's not how I heard it. After reading ''The
Language Police'' by Diane Ravitch, I have a clear
view of why my textbooks (as in at school, not at
wikibooks) are so dull.
First, the textbook companies self-censor for the PC
left and religious right in order to get the big
contracts with the state and to not get sales hurt by
a big lawsuit, initiated by a disgruntled pastor or
feminist who doesn't like the fantasy in Aesop's
fables or the imbalance in the roles of women as
compared to men in history. These lawsuits are
consistantly lost by the parents who want to censor
the books, but it is enough for the textbook to stop
selling almost completely. The textbook companies
don't like this, so they self-censor.
Often three, two, or even only one textbook is
approved in a state as big as California, and they're
not forced to accept every textbook that just meets
standards. They want to accept only textbooks that
will prevent big public outrage. And they do have
standards mandating gender-neutral language and such,
but those aren't as harsh as the censorship the
textbook companies themselves use.
Then, even if the book is approved by the state, it
still needs to get through the school board, which
isn't always that good on allowing objectionable
material through (eg. not perfect race balance
compared to recent US Census or something talking
about the advantages of the UN in extreme cases).
Then, parents complain anyway, even after all of this
censorship, not about the censorship, but about the
lack of more of it.
I'm sorry if this letter sounded like a
conspiricy-theory rant and I'm paranoid, but that's
just what it seems like. So I don't think we should be
aiming at schools. Maybe colleges or homeschoolers? In
colleges, the professors pick out the textbooks, and
they look around for the best one, unlike gradeschool
teachers who have no power over the issue whatsoever.
Homeschoolers tend to dislike textbooks, but that's
probably because they're so terribly written. Or we
could go for a place where this censorship isn't so
bad, possible Europe or Canada?
-LDan
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