Although Christians may respect the conservative influence of some censorship groups, they should beware of influences like Norman Lear’s People for the American Way. Diane Ravitch contends that “Whereas the right gets topic control [of textbooks], the left gets control of language and images.”¹ Although the state adoption proceedings in Texas wield conservative influence over textbooks, the proceedings in California encourage liberal control over the same publishers.

Special interest groups, as diverse as the Anti-Defamation League (that aims to secure justice and fair treatment for the Jewish people) and the Infinity Foundation (a group dedicated to promoting Hindu ideals into American mainstream life), emphasize that influencing American textbooks is critical to their success. (See the following websites: Infinity Foundation and Anti-Defamation League). As publishers cater to these groups, their books become extensions of political and cultural agendas, rather than balanced, scholarly texts.

Because of these politically correct interest groups, there exists a closely followed collection of “bias guidelines”²—used by educational publishers, test development companies, states’ adoption rules, and scholarly and professional organizations—that severely restrict the use of language in secular textbooks.

Read more about the guidelines.
Explore the effect of the guidelines on secular textbooks.

¹ Ravitch, The Language Police, p. 24.
² The most influential of these bias guidelines is published by McGraw-Hill, titled Reflecting Diversity: Multicultural Guidelines for Educational Publishing Professionals (1993).

• The Textbook Trap
  • Do secular textbooks have errors?
  • Errors in science textbooks
  • Errors in history books
  • Examples of errors in secular textbooks
• The “Authors”
  • Who’s writing the secular textbooks?
  • How are secular textbooks compiled?
  • Why are textbooks compiled this way?
  • What happens when textbooks have no author?
• Censorship
  • How do secular publishers handle censorship?
  • Conservative Christian groups
  • Liberal and special interest groups
• What are they thinking?
  • Why do secular publishers do what they do?
  • The way it used to be in textbook publishing
  • The way it is now
• An Insider's Disclosure
  • What does an insider have to say about secular publishers and their agenda?
• Higher Standards
  • Measuring Christian textbooks against secular criteria
  • Informative articles on Christian education