Matt Schiavenza

Who writes the textbooks we use in our schools? Who pays for them? From which point of view do they argue? How do our schools choose these textbooks? Do alternatives exist?

To the last question, I can definitively answer yes. Not long after I arrived in college, a friend lent me a copy of the recently-deceased Howard Zinn’s People History of the United States. Zinn’s conclusions may not please everybody but his immense contribution to historical scholarship cannot be denied.

But think about it- for the average American, an enormous amount of our historical education is inculcated via textbooks. These books- written near-anonymously, in soothing words devoid of any polemical content. Teachers treat these textbooks as repositories of factual information rather than texts worth critically analyzing. As a result millions of children develop a shared sense of ‘what actually happened’ without the faculties to criticize it.

If this wasn’t frightening enough, check out this fascinating, 10-page article in the New York Times Magazine detailing how evangelical Christian activists have managed to hijack the Texas governing body responsible for approving content to the vast majority of American public schools.

At question is the notion of whether the United States is an explicitly Christian nation. Non-American readers may find this question baffling; why does it matter, after all? Yet to understand this divide is to understand the separate political forces that operate in the country.