The Real School Indoctrination Scandal | Will Wilkinson | Cato Institute: Commentary

The Real School Indoctrination Scandal | Will Wilkinson | Cato Institute: Commentary: "Yet in 30 states, local school boards choose textbooks for their entire school districts. In the remaining 20, state-level boards choose textbooks for an entire state. Because statewide markets in California and Texas are so huge, the best bet for the big textbook publishing companies is to tailor their products to the tastes of textbook adoption committees in one or both states, leaving small-state committees with little influence.

We are a spectacularly diverse society, yet we have somehow settled on a system in which enormous captive populations of students are made to learn the same exact thing from the same boring book. When policy requires that every impressionable young mind in a town, city, or state be exposed to one set of assumptions about ethnicity and gender, one approach to religion, one version of American history, one account of Christopher Columbus, one interpretation of the Civil War or the New Deal, you can bet there will be wrenching conflict. And you can bet that the one-size-fits-all textbooks that emerge from this politicized selection process will fit no one. Mind-numbing blandness is the key to their success."

"The ideological differences that fuel the textbook wars wouldn't be such a big deal if we had an education system in which parents, armed with school vouchers or education tax credits, had the power to choose their kids' curricula by choosing their school. With greater school choice, the K–12 textbook market would come to more closely resemble the college textbook market—a lively, competitive scrum where individual instructors select from a wide array of texts embodying different perspectives and pedagogical assumptions."

"Through trial and error and the test of time, certain texts are recognized for excellence and gain market share, but instructors are never at a loss for alternatives. One might worry that greater school choice could lead to a cacophonous Babel of incompatible, ideological educations. Yet, despite dizzying curricular variety, college-level school choice has not kept graduates of Brigham Young and Brown from working amicably side by side in the same companies."