AMEND CORNER: You are biased; so am I, as are most people

Posted 6/2/15

As an antique teacher who helped adopt a few textbooks himself, a battle like this always catches my attention — especially since many of the textbooks I used were in an area most likely to raise objections, American government.

In the scheme …

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AMEND CORNER: You are biased; so am I, as are most people

Posted

A battle has developed in Cody over a set of textbooks the school intends to adopt.

As an antique teacher who helped adopt a few textbooks himself, a battle like this always catches my attention — especially since many of the textbooks I used were in an area most likely to raise objections, American government.

In the scheme of things back when I was teaching in Greybull, we teachers adopted textbooks pretty much on our own. We would work together to make sure the textbooks approached the subject in logical progression and students wouldn’t miss anything or learn the same stuff twice, then chose a series that we thought was good. We would tell the principal which one we wanted and he would OK it with the superintendent.

In some cases, the choice of textbooks was entirely up to one teacher, and American government was one of them. The textbook in that class was always one I chose. There’s not much difference in the content of various government textbooks, so I usually chose on the basis of how the content was presented. I rarely saw any real political bias among textbooks I looked at.

Somewhere along the way, it became the rule to give the public a chance to review our choices. I don’t remember any textbook I wanted being inspected, though, and truth be told, I very rarely had to deal with complaints about the materials I was using. The ones I did get were minor and resolved without much fanfare, which is remarkable, considering I am a bit more liberal than the average Wyomingite.

The lack of protest I had to deal with makes me curious about Cody’s current situation. I am not fully acquainted with the details, but the protest comes from a conservative group that feels the series puts too much emphasis on minorities and too little on the traditional American heroes such as the Founding Fathers, and America’s successes. The group also believes that the series teaches global warming as settled science.

At the heart of their complaint is they detect an overall liberal view in the books, which I suppose is to be expected in a extra-conservative place like Cody.

Bias exists, of course, even among writers of textbooks. Few people are totally objective and free of bias when they make choices. Each of us sees the world through a screen made up of things we have learned or experienced. Each of us sees his biases as the correct way to look at an issue; consequently, he views different ways of looking at that issue as biased. He doesn’t notice his own bias because he doesn’t believe he is biased.

Back in 2000, for example, a photo of George W. Bush published in a newspaper upset a friend of mine. Bush had apparently been caught in a bad moment, and his face was a bit distorted. Two or three days later, the same newspaper published a photo of Al Gore. It was also an unflattering picture; in fact, the two photos were quite similar. When I asked my friend about that photo, he said he hadn’t noticed it.

On another occasion, I read an angry letter to the editor of “American History” magazine. The reader complained that a photo in a previous issue had proved to him that the magazine had become a liberal propaganda piece, and he wasn’t going to buy it any more.

Curious, since I had seen no bias in either direction in the magazine, I dug out my copy of the issue in question to see what the writer was talking about.

On the cover was none other than Ronald Reagan, and he looked very good. Inside I found an article about the speech in which Reagan had called on Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Included was a sidebar from the speechwriter who had written the speech, revealing that he had included the “Tear down this wall” line at Reagan’s suggestion. As it happens, I think that was one of Reagan’s finest hours. Still, I found their view of Reagan a bit biased in his direction.

Most of the other articles in the magazine didn’t lean either way. When I looked at the page that angered the letter writer, I found a brief reminiscence of the 1960s illustrated by several photos from that decade.

I don’t remember what was said about the decade or even what was in the photos now, except for the only one that seemed to fit the writer’s complaint. It pictured a demonstration by abortion rights advocates. One of the demonstrators was holding a placard supporting a woman’s right to obtain an abortion and tagged with a generic comment that there were a lot of demonstrations back then.

Apparently, a relatively tiny photo of a few liberals had the power to turn a magazine featuring Ronald Reagan on the cover into a liberal rag.

Well, I can’t say what elements the Cody group thought made the texts pushers of liberal propaganda, but from my experience, such protests usually turn on a few details, a positive view of labor unions, for example, or the criticism of Franklin Roosevelt.

If there is bias, though, kids should learn to see it, whether liberal or conservative, in any information they receive. They need to understand where those biases come from, and most of all, they need to recognize their own biases and weigh them against the biases of others, and discuss them rationally with those whose biases are different.

If we all learned that skill, we would understand each other better. Our politics would be less divisive, and we might even have better textbooks.

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