Textbook Showdown

There’s a federal trial under way in rural Tennessee that would be little more than amusing were it not for its broad and disturbing implications for public education throughout the country. A group of parents from the Bible Belt town of Church Hill is suing the local school board in an effort to force it to provide alternative reading textbooks that do not contain what the parents call “secular humanism,” which, they say, conflicts with their fundamentalist religious views.

The books in question are a series of basic readers published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston that are approved by Tennessee for public instruc-tion. The material that the parents find offensive includes a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, a passage from “The Diary of Anne Frank” and a story about a boy and a girl in which the boy cooks. The parents say that the story is in conflict with their belief that God has ordained roles for the different sexes. In general the parents complain that the books promote evolution, feminism, supernaturalism and world government and are basically “anti-American and anti-Christian.”

Some people are calling this the second Scopes trial--a reference to another infamous Tennessee case in which John T. Scopes, a high-school biology teacher, was convicted in 1925 of teaching the theory of evolution. It would seem that the good citizens of Tennessee have not progressed much in the ensuing 61 years. But this time, at least, the state is on the right side.

Public-school administrators must be allowed to make academic decisions on the basis of professional criteria free from the community’s political, social and religious pressure. To be sure, parents have a right to oversee their children’s education, but they may not substitute their biases for the pedagogic judgments of professional educators. Parents may certainly control what reading material comes into their home, but they may not control what reading material is used in the public schools, which teach other people’s children as well.

Nor is it satisfactory for the Church Hill parents to say that all they want are alternative textbooks for their children and that anyone else may read the approved Holt, Rinehart books. If every parent could demand alternative books for his child, there would be bedlam--not to mention an unbearable financial and logistical burden on the schools.

In California the professional educators have also felt the pressures from the religious right to scuttle the theory of evolution in biology texts, and have admirably withstood them. But these pressures seldom go away completely. They crop up again and again in various contexts and in various locales. Church Hill is the latest example, but it will not be the last.

In this emotion-laden area the federal courts should do everything that they can to uphold professional, non-sectarian, apolitical decision-making on school curriculums and books.