Textbooks on Trial by James C. Hefley. Foreword by former Congressman John Conlan. Published by Victor Books, 1825 College Avenue, Wheaton, Ill. 60187, $6.95.
It was a case of “a little child shall lead them.” Mel and Norma Gabler, living in Texas where Mel worked in the oil business, were quite happy with the public school system. They trusted the textbooks used by their three sons “almost as much as they did the Bible.” But one day Jim, their oldest boy, brought a copy of Our Nation’s Story, by Laidlaw Brothers, home and handed it to his dad. There was nothing in the book about restrictions on the federal government, and nothing about rights and freedoms retained under the Constitution by the people and the states. It was as if the Bill of Rights had never been written.
That set the Gablers off on a hunt. They looked into other history texts used in the Texas schools. It distressed them to see George Washington downgraded and Patrick Henry(“Give me liberty or give me death”) ignored. In three of the economics textbooks which Mel Gabler dutifully read there was no effort to present fairly the American free enterprise system. The questions in most of the economics texts seemed designed to “subtly move the thinking of the student to the left.”
The Gablers had played a part in the local Parent Teachers Association, but it was “ritual” work. Believing that school personnel “knew best,” they had not questioned the work of the Texas Education Agency in recommending appointees to the State Textbook Committee. When they asked about parents’ rights in the matter of influencing textbook choices, they were told they might appear before an investigating committee in the State capital at Austin. Norma went to Austin and made a speech, her knees “jellied” and her voice quavering. When son Jim, who had accompanied her, asked for the right to “speak as a student” who had been afflicted with the questionable texts, he caused a commotion. The legislator in charge of the hearing uttered a “Well, uh, we’ve never had a student speak before.” Jim was put off for a week, but he returned and presented his analysis of a book that had left him with the impression that, in the American Revolution, “Washington did little more than Baron von Steuben or Benedict Arnold.” Reporters described Jim as a “gum-chewing East Texas kid,” and quoted liberally from his remarks.
When the Gablers first took their cause to the investigating committee in Austin, they didn’t know they were embarked on what was soon to become a lifetime crusade. There were so many school books to read, and nobody seemed to care very much that it took the tenacity of a leech to get early copies of the texts from the “system” that was debating their acceptance for use. The job of questioning the assumptions governing the recommendations of texts involved a thousand subtleties.
The Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution forbade the teaching of religion in the schools. How, then, to acquaint students with a national heritage that stems, in good part, from the eighteenth century acceptance of the Christian ethos? The right of parents to oversee the moral training of their children would seem to be incontestable. This would justify parental objection to the use of pornography in the classroom. But when is literature pornographic, and when is it simply realistic? And what about “situation ethics”? How is one to teach a student to think if he is not to ask questions about the absolute and the relative? Darwin is part of scientific history, and evidence for evolution is written in the rocks. How to square this with the fact that there are gaps in the assumed evolutionary sequence? Even though the Biblical story of Genesis may be questioned in detail, the Creationists have not been routed. Indeed, evolution may very well be the Creator’s way. But how do you give the theory of Creation, whether it be special or evolutionary, an equal standing in school biology courses without mentioning God, which gets us back to the Supreme Court’s ruling that religious instruction in the schools is verboten.
Fairness and Objectivity
In pushing their crusade for better textbooks in the public schools, the Gablers have had to rely on good taste and common sense. They have combined humor and persistence. In telling their story in Textbooks on Trial, James C. Hefley has caught the essence of their personalities. They are neither dogmatic nor fanatical. They don’t expect miracles. They would be satisfied with a balance. Norma, speaking to Mel, put it this way: “It’s our children, our tax money, and our government . . . If textbooks can’t teach Christian principles, then they shouldn’t teach against Christianity.” As for economics, the Gablers think it is again a question of fairness and objectivity. They expect the Keynesians to have their say, but when a single textbook, McGraw-Hill’s Economics for Our Times (1963), came out with “one page on the free enterprise system, six pages on socialism and Communism in which it defends liberal socialism, and two chapters on Big Government,” it seemed that “objectivity” was getting the worst of it.
For years the evaluation of textbooks was an after-hours moonlighting proposition for Mel Gabler. Norma had to do the traveling and the public speaking. But now, with his early retirement from the oil business, Mel has turned to full time work with Norma in running their foundation, Educational Research Analysts. Their main business continues to be with Texas school boards and the Texas Commissioner of Education, but they do advisory work for concerned parents everywhere. During the controversy in West Virginia over textbooks they helped the embattled citizens of Kanawha County present their case for texts that would not “demean, encourage skepticism, or foster disbelief in the institutions of the United States of America and in the Western civilization.” Although the country may have gotten the impression that a bunch of West Virginia hillbillies were trying to “censor” good literature in the mountain schools, the truth is that the West Virginia parents had a good case. Time-tested literary classics had been crowded out in favor of books whose obscenities appalled hardened newspaper editors when they were asked to print some samples in a full-page advertisement.
A Vexing Problem
Philosophically, the Gablers might favor private schools over public. But in Texas, which is where the Gablers were fated to live, they were confronted with the fact that there are few private schools. For their own three sons the Gablers had a choice: they could teach them at home, or they could fight what they call “the self-anointed system of secular humanism” in the public schools. If, like the late Frank Meyer, they had chosen to teach their own children everything from reading to mathematics, they would probably have made a success of it. But this would not have solved the problem for other Texas parents.
Although the state, in public education, is not to be trusted, Mel and Norma Gabler think the pendulum is swinging their way. Says Norma, “disgusted parents” are calling everywhere for “going back to the basics—learning skills, traditional math, phonics, morality, patriotism, history that is really history, science that is science, and fair play for free enterprise economics.”
The question is how to sustain embattled parents in their “disgust.” Mel and Norma Gabler are giving it a good try, but what they really need is a wide revival of private schools to provide a competition that will force the public educators’ hands.
WELFARE: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WELFARE REFORM IN THE UNITED STATES
by Martin Anderson
(Hoover Press, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305) 251 pages n $10.00
Reviewed by Henry Hazlitt
A few of us, over the last dozen years, have attacked the proposal of the guaranteed income and the “negative income tax” in its many guises; but it has remained for Martin Anderson of the Hoover Institution to devote a whole book to the subject, and to do such a thorough job of theoretical and factual analysis that it would seem hereafter impossible for anyone with a candid and open mind to read it and still take the guaranteed income seriously. Dr. Anderson’s book can now stand as the definitive refutation.
Anderson brings to his task a triple advantage. He is first of all a first-rate academic economist. Second, he was himself once a bureaucrat. He was Special Assistant to President Nixon and a consultant to President Ford in the development of the Family Assistance Plan and the Income Supplementation Plan respectively. He knows how bureaucrats work, propagandize, and compile their data.
And finally, what is so rare among academic economists, he writes clearly, simply, incisively and with flavor. Frequent sentences relieve the tension of following his close analysis, such as: “In the sea of dark gray and blue that surrounded Nixon, Moynihan, in his cream-colored suit and red bow tie, gleamed like a playful porpoise.”
The Arguments Assembled and Fully Documented
Anderson goes about demonstrating his case carefully and systematically. Each of his eight chapters is preceded by a like-numbered “thesis,” which he then proceeds to demonstrate in almost Euclidian fashion.
His first thesis is that the “war on poverty” that began in 1964 has been won; that the growth of jobs and income, combined with an explosive increase in government spending for welfare and income transfer programs, has virtually eliminated poverty in the United States. In showing this, he is obliged to refute the influential findings of the Bureau of the Census that in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the poverty problem, there were 26 million persons, or 12 percent of the population, still below the poverty level in 1975— almost as many as when the “war on poverty” began. With the help of his own analysis, and of expert testimony, Anderson shows that the Census estimates are wildly inaccurate—one reason among others being that the Census estimates completely ignore transfers in kind. “People are not even asked,” he writes, “if they received food stamps, live in public housing, or are eligible for Medicaid.” Over $40 billion a year, Anderson points out, is spent by the federal government alone on such programs.
His second thesis is that the virtual elimination of poverty has had costly side effects—the most important of which has been the almost complete destruction of work incentives for the poor on welfare. In many cases families make almost no financial gain when the breadwinner works instead of staying on welfare. To cite a single instance, a Tennessee father who is eligible for food stamps and the unemployment insurance maximum gains only $4 a week by taking a part-time job paying $75 a week. As even the Joint Economic Committee of Congress pointed out in 1972, current government programs discourage work by imposing “the equivalent of confiscatory tax rates” on the resumption of work.
Spending Cuts Advocated
Anderson’s third thesis, based on various opinion polls, is that the overwhelming majority of Americans favor welfare programs for those who cannot care for themselves, while at the same time favoring large cuts in welfare spending because of their strong belief that many welfare recipients are cheating. A guaranteed income is flatly opposed by a two-to-one margin.
His fourth thesis is that the clamor for radical welfare “reform” comes essentially from a small group of committed ideologues who want to institute a guaranteed income under the guise of welfare reform.
His fifth thesis is that the institution of a guaranteed income will cause a substantial reduction—perhaps as much as 50 percent—in the work effort of low-income workers, and that such a massive withdrawal from the work force would have the most profound social and economic consequences. His estimate of this withdrawal from work is based not only on theoretical considerations, but on what happened historically (in the Speenhamland period of 1795 to 1834 in England, for example), and what various factual studies show has already been happening today.
His sixth thesis is that any variety of a guaranteed income is politically impossible; that no radical welfare reform plan can be devised that will simultaneously yield minimum levels of welfare benefits, financial incentives to work, and an overall cost to the taxpayers that are politically acceptable. Anderson’s elegant demonstration that when any two of these three basic elements of radical welfare reform are set at politically acceptable levels, the remaining element becomes unacceptable, is perhaps his most original contribution in this book.
A Debatable Point
His seventh thesis is that practical welfare reform demands that “we build on what we have”—that we reaffirm our commitment to the philosophical approach of giving aid only to those who cannot help themselves, while abandoning any thoughts of radical welfare reform plans that will guarantee incomes. This is the only thesis in Anderson’s book about which this reviewer would have some reservations. I agree entirely that we should abandon the “guaranteed income”—the unconscionable idea that all citizens have the right to be supported by the government, regardless of any effort they may or may not make to support themselves. But I think that Dr. Anderson neglects or underestimates the grave problems we have already created for ourselves by the mixed, haphazard, duplicative, and extravagantly costly relief system we have now built up.
Anderson’s final thesis deals with President Carter’s welfare reform plan, which he first presented in May of 1977, accompanied by statements that it would add only $2.8 billion to previous welfare costs. Anderson finds that the program would add nearly 22 million more Americans to the welfare rolls (making the ultimate total some 66 million); that the federal cost of welfare would actually increase by about $20 billion a year, and that most of that added money would go to families with incomes above the poverty level. It would act as a serious disincentive to work. Though presented as a “simplification,” it would be far more complex, require more welfare workers, and be more difficult to administer than the current welfare system. “It is a potential revolution of great magnitude that could result in social tragedy.”
In an appendix Dr. Anderson lists and spells out in detail no fewer than ninety-one social welfare programs operating in 1974. Nobody knows exactly how many more have since been added.
I have been able to give only the sketchiest outline of the wealth of theoretical and factual analysis to be found in this book. But if one conclusion emerges above all others, it is that would-be reformers must abandon completely their search for any utopian solution to welfare problems.
