With apologies to Ed and Reb...

The textbook market is controlled by the largest buyers. The publishers seek to sell to state school boards and departments of education, which are politically controlled through local and state elections.

Anyone who has ever attended curriculum committee meetings conducted by their local school board will understand this. School boards receive numerous textbooks for review when a portion of the curriculum comes up for review. The public is also invited to review the books, but this invitation is infrequently advertized, which is to say, pay attention. The amount of value placed on public remarks depends on the school board and the community, and on who is making the remarks. (One might expect criticism from a doctor on health curriculum would carry more weight than any comments from, say, a telecommunications specialist.)

Books that receive bad reviews from larger buyers -- think Texas and California -- will not sell, and will be pulled from the market. Books that please the larger markets will stay in print and will be offered to the other, smaller markets. Other publishers pay attention to the content and editorial policies of their successful competitors. It's all about the money.

Many teachers teach without the textbook ("Just leave it in your locker"), and some teach against it. This is why.

Teachers who have been assigned a subject for reasons having nothing to do with teaching, e.g., the football coach who is also a "history teacher" (because "any fool can teach history") so he can be considered faculty for the non-football portion of the school year, are more likely to rely on the textbook as an authority. Barf.

The sanitizing and dumbing down of American texts began during the Truman era. Kids that had fought in WWII were aided by reducing the curriculum standards and many words were axed just so it would be easier to pass them.

The "kids" who fought in WWII were grown men. The GI Bill paid college tuition.

My dad tells stories about his GI Bill college experience at a private college that make us howl. One story in particular supports a different version of the assumption you put forward: the GI Bill scholars had already had an education. They couldn't be bothered with jumping through the various hoops of academe, and the staffs of our colleges and universities understood quite well that they were not entitled to flunk people who had saved the world.

"The dean called a meeting for all the GI Bill guys at the beginning of the term", Dad tells the grandkids, "and some of us actually went. He said, 'Listen, fellas, it's been a great coupla years, but this term we've got some real freshmen coming in, and I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd all behave yourselves and set a good example for them. They're just kids, and they haven't seen the things you have.' Those of us that went passed it on to the other fellas, and we toned it down some."

I suggest to you that the advent of standardized testing (beginning with the IQ tests of the 1950s, which I still remember taking) is the source of our current bland and textureless texts. The tests are the most important thing, and so the texts teach to them. As standardized testing, after becoming a substitute for college admissions exams, trickled down to the elementary level, the restricted required vocabulary trickled down too. How much critical thinking is required to answer multiple choice questions? (a) Very Little (b)25% (c)enough to pick out the right answer (d) Not Much

Your account of the reading materials of the 1930s interests me. Care to post any content? I wonder if the chapter on banks includes reasons why we shouldn't rob them and burn them down, and reasons why they are valuable community institutions, in view of the wide distrust and, yes, hatred that banks enjoyed in the heyday of the Great Depression. Vocabulary don't amount to nuthin' if the thoughts it's used to express are backward, erroneous or inconsequential. Or, for that matter, dated.

Political correctness cuts both ways. A black writer couldn't get published by a large publishing house in the US until after World War II. Their viewpoint was physically denied expression except in the cases of people who could afford to self-publish (the so-called "vanity press" route) or those who, like James Baldwin, fled to Paris and were distributed in America as imports. Why? Not because there was no market, but because publishing a black writer was politically incorrect.

Your last phrase describing political correctness, "but rather more of a social disease used to control and dumb-down the future generation so as to facilitate the transfer of power to a certain group", has been true for a long time, and was practiced with a vengeance by the established cultural and political leaders of the nation to preserve their power through monopoly of the marketplace of ideas. I suggest to you that the reaction to cultural inclusion in our literature and history, which is often called "political correctness", is so ferocious because those who have enjoyed privilege understand that their place is no longer assured.

There's overreaction on both political ends, the intellectual equivalent of the McDonald's coffee brewhaha [sic]. These overreactions deserve our ridicule, especially those that seek to restrict the expression of ideas by pretending they don't exist. But tell me, are you the one to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses that their religion is stupid because they don't allow their children to celebrate holidays? Seems a little extreme to me... but I'm not a Jehovah's Witness. A local high school scheduled Homecoming for Yom Kippur. Jewish parents who objected to their children's de facto exclusion were assailed with charges of "political correctness", even though no one had protested a school calendar which closed school on Christmas. It's easy to be overbearing when one's group is in the majority.

Regards--
Mary Anne