Textbooks

History

Textbooks designed for educational purposes were first written in ancient Greece. The contemporary textbook has its roots in the standardization made possible by Johann Gutenberg's printing press. Compulsory schooling and the subsequent growth of common schools in the United States and Europe led to the printing of standardized textbooks for students. Nationalism, patriotism, and Christianity were prominent themes in early U.S. textbooks such as the New England Primer, the American Spelling Book (also known as the Blue Backed Speller), and the McGuffey Eclectic Readers. These early 18th- and 19th-century textbooks aimed to implant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture by assimilating immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe through deculturalization. The New England Primer prepared readers for submission to authority of the family, the Bible, and the government. Noah Webster wrote the American Spelling Book, which was designed to maintain order in a free society, and which replaced the Primer and was instrumental in giving the U.S. English language vitality and dignity of its own as well as creating a dominant national culture in the United States through its emphasis on the teaching of republican values, nationalistic songs, honoring the U.S. flag, and participation in patriotic exercises. Calvanist William H. McGuffey compiled the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, which were among the first textbooks in the United States that graded textbooks according to their progressive levels of difficulty in reading, science, mathematics, the Great Books (i.e., the Western canon), and history. Rugged individualism, patriarchal hegemony, thrift, honesty, the Protestant work ethic, respect for the flag, the federalist system, and the melting pot theory were among the Puritan principles in this series.

Debates

Textbooks have undergone increasing debates in recent years with critics claiming that textbooks assert White superiority, mythical untruths, and omissions. Curriculum studies scholars argue that textbooks are shaped by political forces of state adoption boards and ideological pressure groups. Influenced by the mid20thcentury civil rights movement and contemporary immigration [Page 880]patterns, today's debate about multicultural education ranges from concerns with empowering oppressed people to creating national unity by teaching common cultural values.

Curriculum leaders of the early multicultural movement of the 1960s to 1980s such as James Banks, Christine Sleeter, and Carl Grant are concerned with empowering oppressed people by integrating the history and cultures of dominated groups into public school curricula and textbooks. Contemporary critical multicultural-ist scholars, such as Dennis Carlson, Henry Giroux, Michael Apple, Peter McLaren, and Stewart Hall, are concerned with reshaping cur-ricular and textbook content with words and imagery dealing with dominated and immigrant cultures, women, gay people, and people living with disabilities.

...