The one about Will Lynch and his agenda

So this Neil Postman guy thinks we should be taking testbooks out of classrooms. His premise behind this is the idea that all textbooks have some sort of slant or “agenda” that is not blatant to readers, educators and students and has the terrifying ability of opening someone’s mind to something other than the garbage and propoganda that he or she had fed to them for the most formidable years of his or her life. But that’s neither here nor there. The idea behind Postman’s thinking is the fact that you can’t tell a textbook that it’s wrong, that you can’t challenge the ideas in them, usually stated as facts. And by eliminating textbooks we’re saving our children, “the future of America” as a talented politician would say, from subtle slant.

Step two to Postman’s process? Well teachers actually have to teach. Personally, as a future lazy, uncaring teacher that’s open to the trap of “coach first, education second”, I know that it is entirely too tricky to teach without a text book and my initial reaction is “okay, but you better pay me a hell of a lot more..” My second reaction is reality and the fact that teachers themselves have subtle agendas that fill up the students’ minds. This I’ve personally experience through the political talks I’ve had with my insanely right-wing, parochial grandmother. She contends that teachers today are teaching America’s youth “liberal garbage” for morals. By liberal garbage she does of course mean elementary school teachers showing the importance of recycling, equality, sharing, and compassion, but that’s beside the point. But you see Postman already has a solution for this; spies. Students to watch out for one-sided views and completely lose entire points of lecture while busy scanning words for liberal or conservative vocabulary.

My personal problem with the probled posed by Postman? Textbooks are completely and utterly necessary for the exact opposite reason that Postman opposes them. Textbooks, nearly by definition, are droning, monotonous parcels of information organized to the best of editors’ abilities to somewhat form rational thought. Textbooks are merely a guide for teachers to follow so that teachers can instill their personal values in unsuspecting students on their own amongst the facts. Teachers and textbooks ought to go hand in hand to avoid the empirically wrong instances of transer of knowledge by some means of osmosis

Textbooks with slant? Everyone knows that history is written by the victors, and if the losers want things written differently then they should’ve tried harder to win.