Was Robin Just a Hood?

A team of Texan critics take textbooks to task

One day back in 1961, young Jim Gabler came home from high school in Hawkins, Texas, and told his parents that he was bothered by his history textbook. When his father, Mel, read the book, Our Nation's Story, he was more than bothered; he was outraged. In a chapter on the U.S. Constitution, the book puffed up the powers of the Federal Government but minimized states' rights. Recalls Gabler: "It was teaching that Washington has complete dictatorial power."

Though neither Mel, 64, nor his wife Norma, 56, was a college graduate (Mel worked as a clerk for Exxon, Norma as wife and mother), they began that day to pursue new careers--part-time at first, then full-time--as readers and harsh critics of textbooks. Says Norma: "I believe that this is what God would want us to do."

Eighteen years after the Gablers began their crusade, Edward Jenkinson, professor of education at Indiana University, calls them "the two most powerful people in education today." That is an overstatement. But the Gablers have certainly inspired attacks on textbooks by a host of community groups and thousands of parents throughout the U.S.

Their most frequent complaints: political bias, lack of patriotism and failure to provide students with firm moral guidance. The nine-room house the Gablers built in 1965 in Longview, Texas, is crammed with shelves of textbooks and copies of line-by-line listings of their objections and those lodged by other volunteers. They have become a clearinghouse ("The nation's largest," says Mel) for critiques written by almost anyone of textbooks, dictionaries and library books. They mail copies on request and receive contributions in return that total some $60,000 per year.

Their power base is the state of Texas, where they have incorporated as Educational Research Analysts, a tax-exempt organization with a staff of six. Their detailed reviews of new textbooks under consideration by Texas schools, and Norma's motherly testimony before the State Textbook Committee have great impact in Texas, where schools have tossed out a number of new dictionaries that included terms like "slut," "queer" and "bed, verb transitive." Their objections to a number of health and government texts aroused elected officials on the Texas Board of Education, who last month dropped five of ten books that the Gablers had opposed. What Texas does affects textbook publishers nationally, because the state selects all elementary and secondary texts through a single committee. Thus, book purchases from Texas provide publishers with large textbook orders.

"We're not censors," argues Mel, adding, "only people with authority can censor." The Gablers simply make their views available to school board members and concerned parents, Norma explains. "They could read the books themselves but for us to read them will save hundreds of hours of time. If you don't read them line by line, you miss the most deadly or damaging content."

One review not written by the Gablers but distributed by them along with their own materials takes exception to sympathetic discussion of Robin Hood in a sixth-grade reader. Because he stole, his story is seen as "an attack on morality." The Gablers object to a seventh-grade reader because it proposes that a panel of students discuss whether computers can replace man. Such a discussion will, they say, imply "that there can be more than one correct answer." Mel objects to mathematics texts that tell young people there are no absolutes in mathematical systems; such relativism can, he insists, destroy a young person's faith.

The Gablers' attention has lately been drawn to Magruder's American Government, a widely used high school text that Texas struck off its list this year. The book says: "Year after year, the Defense Department takes a very substantial slice of the federal budget." The Gablers call that a "subtle bias" in favor of the view that America should disarm. The book also quotes a statement by President Eisenhower in which he voices the historic concern that money for weapons is money not spent to feed the hungry or clothe the cold. Again the Gablers object because they think that the statement shows excessive "stress on the opinion that money spent to defend the whole country should be used to help the poor." They also see bias in the book's standard claim that the Constitution has endured since 1787 through continual interpretation. The fault they find here is "emphasis on the changing nature of our Constitution. The amazing fact about our Constitution is its stability," they observe.

Texas education officials swear by the Gablers. "Their ideas about educational materials are the ideas parents want," says Alton Bowen, deputy commissioner of education. But elsewhere, educators and most of the nation's major textbook publishers take a chillier view. Says Richard Carroll, president of Allyn and Bacon, publisher of Magruder's: "They are attempting to impose their political and social and religious and economic beliefs on everybody else in the U.S." And indeed, though the Gablers claim only to seek "balance," their criticism seems to spring from a hell-for-leather conservatism in politics and Bible belt fundamentalism.

The Gablers are taken seriously outside the South, in part because of persistence and the detailed tenacity with which they do their homework, reading through texts and preparing lists of "objections." People tend to like them personally, because of their courtesy and obvious sincerity. Says one publisher ruefully: "Norma is the only person I know who can talk nonstop and smile at the same time."

But the Gablers have more going for them than that. However daffy their exegeses may sound to some, they reflect parental concerns that are real and run deep. As Mel puts it: "Our basic American values are being thrown out the door." Nationally, there is a powerful current of skepticism about today's educational experts, and a widespread conviction that the schools do not teach the young the values, facts and skills they need. Until schools can prove the skepticism undeserved, they can expect to face challenges, including some as outrageous as those occasionally brought by the Gablers. qed

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