California latest front in textbook war

From AlterNet:

We trust school textbooks to be packed with facts, to be dispassionate overviews of everything that is and that has ever happened. We assume that middle-school and high-school students today know the same stuff we knew at their age: that with certain embellishments, certain improvements and updates, each new generation chiseling its initials into desktops inherits a basic knowledge set, taken for granted, the nuts and bolts and navigators that we studied, back then.

But that was then. Now we live in strange times when everyone nurses his or her own truth. The very concept of objectivity has been deconstructed on kindergarten nap carpets. Thus the question of what deserves to be taught -- and what gets forgotten -- is a political matter. At its core throbs a $4.5-billion-a-year textbook industry in which four megapublishing houses produce nearly all the books used at American public schools. And the process by which it is decided what kids will learn is a big messy mosh. Its winners and losers include pressure groups, religious zealots, lobbyists, school boards, the megapublishers -- Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, Pearson and McGraw-Hill and their many imprints -- and, oh yeah, the kids.

Just as the left and right accuse each other of controlling U.S. media, both also accuse each other of controlling academia.

Sen. Sheila Kuehl -- better known to boomers as the actress who played Zelda in "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," circa 1960 -- authored a bill this year requiring California textbooks to "accurately portray in an age-appropriate manner the cultural, racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity of our society." The state senate approved the bill 22-15 on May 11. LGBT activists celebrated because, in academia, what California does matters. Along with also-populous Florida and Texas, it's an "adoption state," which means that books selected by California's school boards are fast-tracked to being adopted nationwide. Kuehl was optimistic, telling ABC News that she envisioned future textbooks describing James Baldwin not merely as "an African American writer" but as "an African American gay writer." (Baldwin himself preferred being called simply "an American writer" to "a black writer.")