Posted on 04/27/2008 8:16:35 PM PDT by neverdem
An American government textbook author defends his work against allegations of conservative bias.
Of course some textbooks are politically biased. It is not hard to understand why. Opinion surveys and studies of campaign contributions show that the great majority of academic social scientists are liberals, so no one should be astonished to learn that some liberals write left-leaning textbooks and that some of them assign them to their classes.
No doubt there are right-wing textbooks as well, though I suspect that, given the shortage of conservative historians and political scientists, there are fewer of them.
But in my experience, most textbooks about politics are what we call "mainstream": That is, they try hard to cover the facts without seeking to persuade students to support or oppose any particular public policy. I suspect this is not only because of the desire of authors to be fair but a result of the publishers' editorial process.
Before each edition of my text, co-written with John J. DiIulio, is revised every three years, the publisher asks teachers who both do and do not use it to read it and write a lengthy critique. DiIulio and I do not know the names of these reviewers, whose suggestions come to us anonymously.
The comments generally encourage us to write somewhat more about things we have neglected or somewhat less about things we have emphasized. Sometimes, although rarely, they find elements of bias, and in those cases, they urge us to be fairer.
The publishers of other mainstream texts probably do the same thing. The result is that most widely used American government textbooks are relatively free of bias. We also read comments from student users of the book. In the 27 years since our book first appeared, I can recall only one complaint of bias...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
i read this in the morning print edition.
the adjacent article was by a high school kid
who was offended by wilson’s conservativism.
turned out the kid was a left winger.
surprise, surprise!
What utter nonsense.
More gnashing of teeth as the socialists lose their grip.
That’s why I love to find history books written in the 1800’s, the Constitution and Christian materials to homeschool my children.
A recent one was on the history of America that began about one hundreds before the Mayflower and the history of what happened in Europe that encouraged coming to America. Great Read.
Went out and bought the Federalist Papers yesterday. I heard Scalia gently chiding students that had not read them. That was enough for me.
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