[Textbook-l] distinct books

Thu Aug 14 18:02:14 UTC 2003

Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> First, the textbook companies self-censor for the PC
> left and religious right in order to get the big
> contracts with the state and to not get sales hurt by
> a big lawsuit, initiated by a disgruntled pastor or
> feminist who doesn't like the fantasy in Aesop's
> fables or the imbalance in the roles of women as
> compared to men in history. These lawsuits are
> consistantly lost by the parents who want to censor
> the books, but it is enough for the textbook to stop
> selling almost completely. The textbook companies
> don't like this, so they self-censor.

My own view is that NPOV itself provides a sort of self-censorship
that is hopefully not as heavy handed as what a proprietary
development process comes up with.

NPOV is designed to be maximally acceptable to a wide range of people.
A feminist and a pastor of very different political and ethical
frameworks ought to be able to read any NPOV article or book and agree
that it's fair.

With a proprietary development process, the only way to achieve
consensus is to simply omit or water down material that might offend.
With the many-minds creativity of the wiki process, there's usually a
way to present the material in such a way that everyone can agree on
it.

> I'm sorry if this letter sounded like a conspiricy-theory rant and
> I'm paranoid, but that's just what it seems like.

No, I don't think that.  These are legitimate issues and we do have to
consider them.

> Or we could go for a place where this censorship isn't so bad,
> possible Europe or Canada?

I think you'll find that things are generally *much* worse elsewhere,
and especially in Canada.

In Canada, a man was fined for placing an ad in the newspaper quoting
from Leviticus and condemning homosexuality.  This was upheld on
appeal.

This website is worth reviewing, too:
http://www.bcla.bc.ca/ifc/censorshipbc/intro.html