High Life / A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Up in Arms Over Errors in Textbooks

Texans should be outraged because new U.S. history textbooks proposed for use in the state’s public schools contain more than 200 factual errors, a state Board of Education member said recently.

Jane Nelson said the errors--including a statement in one book that the United States settled the Korean conflict by “using the bomb”--were not detected by publishers or the state’s textbook review process.

Nelson distributed a list of 231 purported textbook errors developed by conservative textbook critics Mel and Norma Gabler and said she had verified most of them.

Among other incorrect statements, she said, are that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated while Richard M. Nixon was president, when Lyndon B. Johnson actually was in office, and that George Bush defeated Michael S. Dukakis in 1989, rather than in 1988.

The board unanimously approved Saturday a recommendation by Texas Education Commissioner Lionel Meno to postpone until January consideration of about $20 million worth of textbooks to give publishers time to correct the errors.

“This is horrifying,” Nelson said of all the mistakes. “It’s absurd that this gets past the publishers. . . . I mean, they’re making a lot of money on these textbooks.”

Nelson, a Republican, is running for state Senate. But she said her campaign is unrelated to her complaint. She added that she is particularly sensitive to quality control because her family owns a company that makes airplane parts.

“If you knew that a plane had 231 errors in it, would you fly?” she asked. “Yet, we are going to put these same errors in our textbooks and give them to our children.”

“A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.”

--Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1850)