No "heroines," owls, birthdays or pumpkins -- they might offend somebody

What do you think the long-term societal consequences of textbook censorship might be? Will future politicians and educators grow up without knowledge of the upsetting bits of our history and world history?

Well, they're getting a very partial view, particularly with world history. What I've found is that the textbook publishers, most of them, will run everything by the group that's being discussed and say, "How do you feel about this and is it OK if we put it this way?" And then they seem to be responding to their advisory committees and trimming and tailoring to avoid getting into trouble.

I think the main consequence of these tactics is that they create a credibility gap for children. I think that kids get bored, and I think they get cynical. Because they find that there's a real world out there and they can learn more about it by watching television or going on the Internet. And they may be getting a lot of falsehoods from those mediums, but at least it's interesting, it's exciting and it's not like these carefully sanitized materials that are presented to them at school.

Did you ever think of this book as being an argument in favor of home schooling?

No, but I've gotten a lot of response from home schoolers. In my view home schooling is a romantic notion. There are only about 1 million kids in the U.S. being home schooled, while there are nearly 50 million who are not. I don't expect that ratio's going to change very dramatically.

But I do think it's a bad thing for parents to assume that once their kids are in school, their responsibility as parents has somehow ended for the day. You do have to be involved, and look at your kids' textbooks, and be concerned about whether they're getting a rich enough history education and literature education to be prepared for college, or just to have a fulfilling life.

You mentioned in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor that the censorship of texts now is worse than it was even right after the Civil War, when educators were teaching one account of history in the North and another in the South. Could you talk a little about that?

Well, that's a hard judgment to make because the textbooks of the time were not very good textbooks. If I had to put them on a scale I would say that I'd rather have today's history textbooks with all of their faults. On the other hand, if I had to choose a literary textbook, I'd choose one of the 1890s every time. Because the literature textbooks from the turn of century always began with an introduction saying "Our purpose is to introduce young people to the best literary gems."

That's not what literature textbooks do anymore. The Heart of Oak series from 1902, and other readers, had Dickens, Shakespeare, wonderful British and American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emerson and on and on. Their goal was to train young people to have good taste in literature, and nobody has that goal anymore.

Of course, all the authors you just mentioned are dead white men. To the people who would be offended or upset by that selection of authors, what would you say?

Well, there were not any black writers included in the readers of that time. If I were creating a reader today, there would certainly be black writers, wonderful writers from different cultures. For the reader I edited 10 years ago, called the American Reader, I included black writers and women writers and writers from different American cultures. So I don't have a problem with that.

In the book you talk about the fears from both the extreme right and the extreme left that children will act out what they read, and therefore the selections should present role models. Do you disagree that role modeling and behavior modification should be one goal of education?

Yes and no. Yes in that I think teachers should have standards of behavior and should be good role models of civil discourse and should help young people learn how to talk to each other and express themselves. But literature is not about role modeling. When we read Shakespeare, we read about murders and all kinds of terrible expressions of human emotion, but that doesn't mean that by reading Shakespeare we will become King Lear or Lady Macbeth.

I was doing a talk show yesterday in Florida and the host and I were talking about the Harry Potter series -- which has the distinction of being both the most popular book in the U.S. and, according to the American Library Association, the most banned -- and we were talking about why the series is offensive to people, particularly people of very conservative religious views. I think there are two reasons; one, Harry comes from a dysfunctional family, and two, because of all the witchcraft and sorcery in the book.

In the call-in section of the show, a girl called -- I don't think I'm supposed to call her a girl but she had a very young voice -- and said, " I would recommend that people not read the Harry Potter series, because it teaches witchcraft." And the same people would say, don't read Huckleberry Finn because your children will be disobedient. But the idea that everything you read is somehow going to become the model for your behavior -- gosh, then what are you going to read? You can't read the Bible. There's all that adultery and murder, not a good place to look for role models. So what are you left with? I don't know. Textbooks, I guess.

Which is worse, censorship from the left or from the right?

They're both awful. They hold hands, and together they wreak damage. I don't like either one, and I wouldn't want to choose. All censorship is bad.

Which political party are you affiliated with?

I've been a registered Independent for the past 10 years. A fierce Independent. Before that, I was a registered Democrat.

In the book, you talk about how the educational publishing industry is bound by the state adoption process, that since developing textbooks is very expensive, publishers are under pressure to make sure their textbooks are adopted by the biggest share of the market -- particularly big states such as Texas and California. How can this process be eliminated?

Well, the first thing is to generate public outrage, and that's my part. I'm trying to get the word out there that this process of censorship is widespread, it's become the industry standard, and it should be intolerable. At that point I would hope that an outraged public would go to the state Legislature in Texas and California and say, "Look what's been done to the educational publishing industry -- we've got to reverse this." But the people who are now making textbooks would much rather sell a million textbooks to the state of California, than have to go to a million teachers to sell their books in competition with a dozen other publishers.

Do you have children?

I do. I have two kids who are grown, and two grandkids.

Do you see a difference in how your children were educated and how your grandkids are being educated?

Yes. All four are readers, but my sons -- their teachers didn't use a textbook, their teachers used novels and they were assigned poems that hadn't been rewritten by state officials, and they had a wonderful education. One of them went on to major in literature at Yale.

My grandkids love to read also, but when my daughter-in-law took the reading list from my book -- which included "Selected Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen, "Aesop's Fables" and the Brothers Grimm -- and took it to her school the teacher said, "Oh, so that's what you mean by classic literature!"

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