The Nation : U.S. History Texts Criticized as Bland

Many widely used American history texts are bland and deprive students of the richness of their past because publishers have knuckled under to interest groups and state authorities, a report by a panel of experts concluded. The 78-page report, “American History Textbooks: An Assessment of Quality,” was sponsored by the Educational Excellence Network based at Columbia Teachers College in New York. It said the blandness pervading history texts applies to both content and language, and is made worse by “readability scales,” formulas commonly used by publishers to keep vocabulary and sentence structure simple. It urged publishers to reduce the size of texts, eliminate showy but irrelevant illustrations, emphasize primary source materials, and hire better writers.