history are not limited to our schooling, after all. These cultural lies have been
woven into the fabric of our entire society. From the flat-earth advertisements
on Columbus Day weekend to the racist distortion of Reconstruction in Gone
With the Wind, our society lies to itself about its past. Questioning these lies
can seem anti-American. Textbooks may reflect these lies only because we
want them to. Textbooks may also avoid controversy because we want them to:
at least half of the respondents in national public opinion polls routinely agree
that “books that contain dangerous ideas should be banned from public school
libraries.”^93 And when the National Assessment for Educational Progress sent
its social studies assessment instruments to lay reviewers “to help insure that
[they] would be acceptable to the general public,” the public replied,
“references to specific minority groups should be eliminated whenever
possible”; “extreme care” should be used in wording any references to the
FBI, the president, labor unions, and some other organizations; and “exercises
which show national heroes in an uncomplimentary fashion though factually
accurate are offensive.”^94
John Williamson, the president of a major textbook publishing company,
employed this line to defend publishers: “In the thirties, the treatment of
females and of black people clearly mirrored the attitudes of society. All
females were portrayed in homemaker roles.... Blacks were not portrayed at
all.” Williamson went on to admit that recent improvements in the treatment of
women and blacks have not been owed to publishers, “much as we would like
the credit.” As in the past, “textbooks mirror our society and contain what that
society considers acceptable.” Williamson concluded that all this was as it
should be—parents, teachers, and members of the community should have the
right to pressure publishers to present history as they want it presented.^95
Williamson has a point. However, when publishers hide behind “society,”
their argument invokes a chicken-and-egg problematic, for if textbooks varied
more, pressure groups in society would have more alternatives for which to
lobby. Moreover, Williamson has conceded the major point: that history
textbooks stand in a very different relationship to the discipline of history than
most textbooks do to their respective fields. “Society” determines what goes
into history textbooks. By contrast, the mathematics profession determines
what goes into math textbooks and, creationist pressure notwithstanding, the
biology profession determines what goes into biology textbooks. To be sure,
mathematics and biology textbooks are products of the same complex