Devious Publishing Industry Cons Impressionable Children Into Believing That Hispanics Are Friendly, Well-Groomed
An article in Saturday's Wall Street Journal profiled the seamy world of textbook publishing; a world where all is not as it appears. Turns out that in some misguided, knee-jerk liberal attempt to, uh, sell more books, publishers are presenting a world more diverse than it really is.
To facilitate state approval and school-district purchasing of their texts, publishers set numerical targets for showing minorities and the disabled. In recent years, the quest to meet these targets has ratcheted to a higher level as technological improvements enable publishers to customize books for individual states, and as photos and illustrations take up more textbook space.
Even worse, many of these supposedly disabled kids are actually models, who are paid real money to fake cripple, and not in the good, slobbery spastic way.
Thomas Hehir, a Harvard professor of education and former director of special education at the U.S. Department of Education, says the able-bodied models in wheelchairs don't resemble most disabled children, who have conditions such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy that "affect their appearance in other ways. I look at the pictures in the textbooks and I say, 'This doesn't look like a kid I know. How did this kid become disabled?'
Perhaps most insidiously of all, Big Textbook is trying to take away our most cherished stereotypes:
An older McGraw-Hill manual — which a company spokeswoman says is "still relevant" as guidance — discourages depicting Asian-American males as waiters, laundry owners or math students, or showing Mexican men wearing ponchos or wide-brimmed hats. African-Americans should not be portrayed in "crowded tenements on chaotic streets" or in "innocuous, dull, white picket fence neighborhoods," but in "all neighborhoods, including luxury apartments."
There you have it. We've turned our children's educations into a non-stop presentation of The Jeffersons. No wonder Johnny can't read; he's too busy worrying that all those affluent black kids he sees in his schoolbook are going to earn more than he will someday.
