Textbooks And Controversy

Textbooks have been contested matter in North Carolina history
(The Associated Press, November 25, 2011)

From the pages of "The First Dixie Reader," North Carolina schoolchildren once learned, along with instruction in spelling and grammar, the kindness of slavery, as told through the parable of "Old Aunt Ann" and her owner, "Miss Kate."

"Many poor white folks would be glad to live in her house and eat what Miss Kate sends out for her dinner," says the 1863 textbook, which was printed in Raleigh.

The book is one of many on display through Jan. 31 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Library as part of an exhibit called "Curriculum and Controversy," which traces 200 years of state history through the lens of the books its children learned from.

The Civil War textbooks, including one from Greensboro that presents a Biblical defense of slavery, are some of the most attention-grabbing, but the exhibit runs all the way up to the 21st century at the development of Learn NC, the state's first digital textbook. Along the way it takes in political infighting, crusading newspaper editorialists, the theory of evolution and the introduction of black characters to the "Dick and Jane" books.

"Until we started working on this exhibit, I didn't realize the politics behind textbooks went back so far," said Linda Jacobson, keeper of the North Carolina Collection gallery and one of the exhibit's organizers.

As she began to dig through the old books, she was also startled at the stark, occasionally morbid moral lessons they contained, as in the 19th century textbook that included a chapter called "The Dead Baby."

"I was stunned by what I would consider adult content in these books," Jacobson said. "But these books were as much guides for life as they were intended to teach academic subjects."

The story of distinctive North Carolina textbooks started with Calvin Henderson Wiley, a journalist, lawyer and politician who became the state's first superintendent of common, or public, schools in 1853. Because the textbook industry at the time was dominated by publishers in New England and New York, Wiley published his own text, "The North Carolina Reader," to provide state-specific lessons.

The end of the Civil War didn't take the politics out of state textbooks, which students and their families had to pay for until 1937.

A section of the exhibit traces the treatment of the 1898 Wilmington race riot in state textbooks, showing how the episode in which dozens of black residents of the city were killed by white mobs has changed. A 1907 text doesn't even mention it, while a book published in 1916 casts the event in favorable terms, teaching students to call it "The Wilmington Revolution." It wasn't until a 1978 textbook that the event, which followed a Democratic electoral victory over a coalition of black and white Republicans, was described in terms more familiar to mainstream historians.

"For so many decades, African-Americans weren't even really included in textbooks," Jacobson said.

As one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the country, North Carolina has a lengthy formal process in place for selecting which books and supplementary materials its public school students will use, with the final approval coming from the members of the state Textbook Commission.

The politically-motivated narratives of bygone eras are not something the commission members see very much of nowadays, according to co-chairman Charles Gaffigan, who's also principal of East McDowell Junior High School in Marion.

"Our criteria for the way we select textbooks is simple: Do they meet the standard course of study for North Carolina?," he said. "This is what's supposed to be taught, so do you have that material covered?"

Not all controversies are quite so far in the past, though. In the late 1990s, an unsuccessful attempt was made in the General Assembly to require teachers and texts to treat the science of evolution as one theory among others. The measure was approved by the state House of Representatives, but died in the Senate.

That was an echo of a fight over evolution in the 1920s, when two textbooks were banned from state classrooms on the urging of Gov. Cameron Morrison because they taught the theory of evolution. Both books are on display at the exhibit.

Gaffigan said he hasn't seen anything like that in his 10 years on the commission, but members of the panel do occasionally raise objections to texts, just not to politics.

"We had a publisher bring us a book that said Charlotte was the capital of North Carolina, and another that said Durham was in the western part of the state," he said.