By the 80s, Norma and Mel had gained real traction in the textbook industry. And with their newfound power, they start dictating what goes into textbooks. They threaded their conservative Christian beliefs into textbooks across the nation, with little regard for separating fact from opinion.
By the 80s, Norma and Mel had gained real traction in the textbook industry. And with their newfound power, they start dictating what goes into textbooks. They threaded their conservative Christian beliefs into textbooks across the nation, with little regard for separating fact from opinion.
Teaching Texas is a new audio documentary from Wonder Media Network that uncovers the surprising history behind America’s latest culture war.
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Grace Lynch on Twitter: @gracelynch08
Teaching Texas
Chapter 2: The More Sex You Teach…
Transcript
60 Minutes Host:
She has been called education’s public enemy number one. Who is she? Well she is simply a housewife, the mother of three sons, and a grandmother too. And though she has never gone to college, when Norma Gabler speaks, the education establishment of the state of Texas listens.
Norma Gabler:
Every child should not have to sit in the classroom and read profanity and guttural language.
GRACE
In 1980, Mel and Norma’s textbook reviews caught the attention of CBS’s 60 minutes.
60 Minutes Host:
She and her husband Mel have gone on a kind of crusade, warning parents all across America to watch out for what’s in their children’s textbooks.
Norma:
Your children are a captive audience. They don’t have the right to get up and walk out. Your television, you can turn the dial, or you can turn it off. You don’t turn off a classroom. [fade out]
GRACE
In this segment, they’re displaying all their folksy charm. Norma is making sandwiches. And she’s speaking to groups of parents in rooms with really incredible patterned wallpaper. There’s this one shot of them in their modest Longview house, surrounded by papers.
Making their case for objecting to textbooks on national television.
Mel Gabler:
[fade in] We do not want imposed on the students just our viewpoint. But we feel it’s totally unfair to have our viewpoint totally censored when at least half the United States might be considered favorable toward our viewpoint.
GRACE
Remember — these are two retirees with no prior political experience, no background in education, and not that much money. And yet by the 1980s, the entire textbook industry knew Mel and Norma Gabler.
Host:
Now just how important are the Gablers?
Interviewee:
They probably had more influence on the use of textbooks in this country than any other two people.
GRACE
From Wonder Media Network, I’m Grace Lynch, and this is Teaching Texas episode two.
In this episode – how the Gablers amassed so much power, and what they decided to do with it.
By the time the Gablers were featured on 60 Minutes, textbooks had taken over their lives.
Jim Gabler:
I think my mother kind of partitioned it a little more than my dad, but my dad was just, I, if he was awake, he was thinking about it.
GRACE
That’s Mel and Norma’s son, Jim Gabler. Although Jim had a hand in starting this whole crusade, he left for college before things really got going. But even from afar, he could see that his parents had become consumed by it.
By the 1980s, Norma Gabler had traveled to 42 states and two foreign countries. Everywhere she went, she taught concerned parents how the textbook industry worked and how they could have a say in the process.
But by going on TV, the Gablers could reach living rooms across the country all at once, without having to hop on a plane. After the 60 Minutes segment aired, the Gablers went on programs like the Phil Donahue Show, Crossfire, and 20/20.
In 1982, Mel was a guest on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, hosted by Jim Lehrer.
Jim Lehrer:
Tonight Mr. Gabler is with us from the studios of public station KLRU in Austin. Mr. Gabler, generally, what are you trying to accomplish with your textbook efforts? What's the overall purpose, in other words?
Mel Gabler:
I would say that we're trying to get textbook adoption out from behind closed doors, out in the open where the public can see what their money will purchase before the books are bought. Now, in Texas we have such a process … [fade out]
Joan DelFattore:
Mel and Norma Gabler had a genius for dealing with the press.
GRACE
That’s professor and author Joan DelFattore. As I mentioned last episode, in the 80s and early 90s she was writing about textbook censorship. That meant she saw the Gablers in action.
Joan DelFattore:
They could get the word out. They had ways of — and it seemed very folksy by today's standards — but they had ways of publicizing what they were doing. In some respects, the Gablers are a model for, um, how to conduct debates compared with some of what's going on today. They never used bad language. They never personally attacked anybody. Um, even if you disagreed with what they were saying, they conducted the argument in a far more civil way than similar arguments tend to be conducted today.
GRACE
When I watch archival tape of Norma and Mel, I’m struck by how nice they seem. They were never mean or combative. They didn’t go on TV and call textbook publishers radical leftists.
They were just trying to get one point across. If you didn’t like what was in your child’s textbook, you had the power to change it.
In 1982, they went on Firing Line with William F Buckley. It was a debate style show. Norma and Mel sat next to Pamela Bonell, a journalist and librarian who was in opposition to the Gablers' work.
There’s this moment where Norma is explaining how the textbook approval process works, and what their role in it is. And she is so sweet, and clear, and convincing.
Norma Gabler:
The committee itself makes the decision. They have to make the decision on which books will be adopted and which will not. Uh, there’s no citizen that has the opportunity. We have never had a vote on a textbook. So actually I don’t know whether we have, what effect we have or not. We’re probably given a lot of credit for, but actually we don’t have the vote, so that makes a big difference.
Interjection:
But see the committee …
Norma Gabler:
But we have a voice … [fade out]
GRACE
The Gablers tried to get this point across in almost every interview they did. They weren’t trying to demonize anyone. It was just that regular citizens should have a say in textbooks, Norma and Mel were there to democratize the textbook approval process. Let people know they had the power to influence what their kids learned in school.
That message, plus the sandwich making and the patterned wallpaper backgrounds, all combine to create this portrait of Mel and Norma as nice, harmless, concerned citizens.
But the people who could walk past the cameras and see them face to face got a fuller understanding of who Mel and Norma were and what they were really doing to the textbook industry.
People like their son, Jim Gabler.
When I talked to Jim, I figured his perspective would mirror that of his parents. And in certain ways, it does. But what fascinated me about Jim was how introspective he was about their legacy.
Jim Gabler:
I'm just saying that if you look over, look at it over years, you realize the, the environment has changed on their part. It was like we did all of this work and through this process and so if a school board, uh, wants to ask us for those resources, we'll be glad to prepare it. You know, allow 'em to have a copy of it. That's that's easy enough done. And so over time they started having school districts that would say, you know, “Can we get a copy of these books are in there? We're trying to decide and what you have would help.”
GRACE
This “shift in environment” meant that as the Gablers gained power and notoriety, they started doing more than just teaching parents how to voice their opinions.
People wanted to know what opinions they should be voicing. And the Gablers were happy to oblige. They even used their newfound national platform to publicize those opinions to a wider audience. You can hear it creeping in during Mel’s appearance on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report:
Mel Gabler:
In fact, I don't think there's any question about the fact that we have a problem in education. For instance, 40 years ago the problem then as far as a student was concerned were such things as not putting waste paper in a wastepaper basket or getting out of turn in line or speaking in class. Now what do you have in the classrooms? You have a great amount of violence and abuse, drug problems and so forth, and something has caused that change, and we feel it's because the textbooks have totally abandoned, or almost totally abandoned, the basic traditional American values on which our nation was founded.
GRACE
Politicians, educators, even publishers began turning to the Gablers for solutions. And with that, the Gablers went from textbook analysts to textbook advisors.
When people asked the Gablers what they thought should be in textbooks – they had answers. And those answers were pretty controversial, because they were heavily informed by Mel and Norma’s specific worldview.
Remember: the Gablers were conservative Christians. The entire world, to them, was governed by religion. That meant religion should have a place in public schools. They outlined these ideas in the mailers they sent out. One of them reads:
Christianity and the Bible were never intended to be banished from our public schools. In fact, many laws on our statute books require us to propagate in our public schools religion and morality as well as knowledge. Most of the states require daily Bible reading. ALL THIS THE SUPREME COURT HAS COMPLETELY REVERSED.
GRACE
The last sentence is in all caps.
Joan DelFattore:
So what the Gablers saw, and I, far as I can tell, I have no reason to believe they weren't sincere about this. There are only two, uh, points of view. There's what the Bible says and there's everything else. So to them, it, it was the kind of, if you are not with me, you're against me. So if it says in the Bible that women are to be subject to men, then if someone says, “no, women are not to be subject to men,” to them, that is a competing religious view because to them, the question of whether women should be subject to men is inherently a religious question. Therefore, whatever you say about it is inherently religious. And to them, the whole world was inherently religious.
GRACE
Refusing to teach biblical principles, to them, amounted to promoting an alternative religion, which they called “Secular Humanism.” Now, Secular Humanism is a real thing. But it’s not a religion. It’s a philosophy that rejects religious beliefs in favor of human reason. But again, everything boils down to religion for the Gablers. It’s either theirs, or yours.
Norma and Mel felt it was important to teach morality in schools. But when they talk about morality it’s specific to their religious values. To them, teaching morality was the solution to rising crime, teen pregnancy rates, every other American problem you can think of.
That resulted in some … questionable objections to what was in textbooks.
Dan Quinn:
There were objections to a woman carrying a briefcase as she left the home to go to work. And they demanded that that be replaced by a photograph of a woman baking a cake, um, ‘cause that was a more traditional gender role. They objected to line drawings of breast self exams for cancer or testicular self exams for cancer.
GRACE
And it wasn’t enough for textbooks to support Christian values and social norms – they needed to be explicitly pro-Christianity.
In her book, Joan talks about one textbook the Gablers reviewed that had a passage about Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century theologian. The passage was about Martin Luther’s role in the German Peasants Revolt of 1524. It said that Martin Luther didn’t back the peasants in their revolt. In fact, he told the princes to crush the revolt. Which the princes then did.
The Gablers felt that passage associated Christianity with violence. Instead, they suggested that the reason Martin Luther didn’t back the revolting peasants was because he was against violence and bloodshed.
The problem is that’s just not true. There’s an actual piece of writing from Martin Luther where he says, “It’s the time of the sword, not the day of peace…Stab, smite, slay, whoever can.”
So historically, Martin Luther was not against violence and bloodshed. He was actually pro stabbing, smiting, and slaying.
Despite the primary evidence available, the Board of Education sided with the Gablers’ interpretation. The textbook publisher deleted that passage on Martin Luther, and replaced it with a sentence that said, quote, “he was opposed to the violence and bloodshed, and thought the peasants should obey princes or lords.”
Now, you would think that’s the only time the Gablers would have an objection related to the protestant historical figure Martin Luther. But you’d be wrong.
Another year, there was a textbook that contained an essay comparing Martin Luther to Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights activist. The Gablers objected to this essay, too. They didn’t think that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. should be put in the same category.
The way they saw it: one of the Martin Luther’s was religiously-dedicated, and non-violent. The other was a communist, who advocated violence and disrespect for authority. You can decide which one they thought was which.
The Gabler’s also wanted textbooks to feature more whitewashed versions of American history – like not mentioning that George Washington enslaved African Americans.
And they wanted the things that they saw as immoral to be taken out of textbooks – like any mention of LGBTQ people. They advocated for little to no mention of sex. As Norma put it in that Firing Line with William F. Buckley interview:
Norma Gabler:
The more sex you teach, the, the better they’re going to know how to do it!
GRACE
And every year, they would head to Austin and make these objections known to the state board. Here’s Joan again.
Joan DelFattore:
Uh the Texas, um, textbook selection committee would set up on a dais and there was a podium and a microphone to one side and the room was divided it — not by rule, but just, um, by custom — the publishers representatives would sit on one side and the protesters would sit on the other. The objective was to get the textbook committee to recommend to the board that the board should tell the publisher that you can't, we will not buy this book in Texas unless you make the following changes.
GRACE
Typically, publishers would sit quietly in the hearing rooms, taking down notes on the Gablers’ objections.
But, Joan did tell us a story of a time where another conservative protestor was objecting to a health textbook. And a representative from the publishing company spoke up.
Joan DelFattore:
A, um, protestor was saying that they didn't like it-a health book that showed a picture of a breast self-examination. So it had-it didn't show a naked breast. It showed concentric circles and, at the time, the way you were supposed to do a breast self exam. So the, there were quite a few people who were complaining about that. And they said it would encourage the girls to stimulate themselves and to be immodest, that this was a sexually stimulating thing. So the publisher, got on his feet, which surprised everyone, cause they never said anything. And he said, “young women typically don't die of anything. But when young women do die of natural causes, breast cancer is the leading cause. What happens if we take this out of the book and somebody dies of breast cancer who didn't need to?” And the protestor who was at the microphone replied, “at least she would die pure.”
GRACE
Although that story isn’t about Mel and Norma specifically, I think it speaks to the ideology of their movement in a really profound way. Like that protestor, to Mel and Norma, the actual information in the textbook wasn’t as important about the story that textbook was telling kids — about what it means to be pure or impure, moral or immoral.
Joan DelFattore:
As far as I could tell, they genuinely believed in what they were saying. They genuinely believed that it didn't matter if say Washington did have forced labor camps. The question was, how do we want the children to see George Washington? That was the operative point. How do we want the children to view George Washington? We want to view him as the hero, the founder of our country, the foundation myth. And so we put in the books what will reach that goal. And to them, it was very simple. There, there were not two sides to this. You decide what you want the children to believe and then that's what you put in the book, and why is that a problem?
GRACE
There’s no one way to tell the story of American history. Textbooks are always going to leave something out. They only have so much space. There’s only so much time in a school year. And usually, it’s the experts that make that decision. Historians and educators who write the textbooks in the first place.
Until Norma and Mel showed up on the scene.
Their system of ideological objections to textbook materials did more than just give parents a voice, or make sure that textbooks were completely factual. They changed what went into the books — for decades to come.
There’s one story that Dan Quinn told me that really illustrates this point. Back in 1994, Dan was working for a textbook publishing company. That year, his company had a health textbook up for adoption. He didn’t work on the textbook himself. But he had a friend who did. And she asked him to look over some of the work she was doing for the teacher’s edition of the textbook.
Dan Quinn:
I recall there was an essay in there about-for teachers on what do you do if you have a student in your classroom and you think, or you know, that they might be gay. Um, you know, how do you address that? And there was information, there was a, a hotline that they might, if they chose share with the student, uh, that they could get more information to be supportive, learn something more about themselves, about where they could find help. As a gay man, I was thrilled to death that they had something in there because I would've loved to have that and had that information when I was a teenager. Um, and so naively as a young editor, I thought, yeah, this looks great. This is good info. Why not?
GRACE
But when the textbook was submitted to the State Board of Education for approval, it received a lot of objections. And they don't sound all that different from conservative talking points today.
Dan Quinn:
That textbook then became kind of a lightning rod for criticism from social conservatives. They especially objected to any information on sexual orientation. Even though the vast majority of that information on sexual orientation was in the teacher's edition. But social conservatives attacked that as indoctrination, um, that the school was now gonna be indoctrinating kids in the homosexual lifestyle. And so that became a major battle. They were demanding hundreds of changes to all the textbooks.
GRACE
And these ideological objections ended up having a big effect on the textbook approvals that year.
Dan Quinn:
All the criticism, the textbook got so bad, um, that eventually the publisher, we had a large all company meeting at a big movie theater in town. And we were all sitting there and the president of the company just stood before us and said, “we don't support homosexuality. We don't oppose homosexuality. We're just trying to teach health education. And at this point we're gonna withdraw our textbook from consideration here rather than make all of these changes, all of these deletions that, uh, were being called on to make.” Well, that was a big deal because they'd obviously spent a lot of money creating that textbook. And so not getting the market share that they were hoping for in Texas meant they lost a lot of money, and my friend was worried she was gonna lose her job. She didn't, thank goodness, but it was a lesson for me. You know, you can't be naive if you're gonna work for a publisher.
GRACE
The health textbook that Dan had been so excited to review was pulled from consideration in Texas. And unsurprisingly, the textbook that Texas did end up adopting was much closer to the Gablers’ ideology.
Dan Quinn:
One publisher in particular, uh, didn't have information on sexual orientation. They didn't have information on contraception, and they made that a sales pitch. You know, we are the only textbook that doesn't teach kids about contraception, that we focus on abstinence and we don't teach alternative lifestyles. Well, nobody was teaching alternative lifestyles of course, but that infuriated all of the publishers, um, but it was successful for that particular publisher in Texas.
GRACE
These decisions had the potential to really affect students. Often, because of the Gabler’s objections, the textbooks that were approved for use in Texas glossed over racism and espoused sexist values.
That shaped the way kids understood the world. If you didn’t fit into the mold that the Gablers or other Christian conservatives thought was right, you were “the other.” Your lived experience was less than, or even, deviant.
Dan’s story about the health textbook happened around the time when the Gablers had the most influence.
But even decades after their peak, their impact lingered in the textbook industry. They had created a market of fear, and in order to play it safe, publishers started to self-censor the books they submitted for approval.
Dan Quinn:
Good example in 2004: publishers submitted new health textbooks again. It was the first adoption since the decade earlier debacle. Um, this time they self censored their own books. Gay people had completely disappeared, no contraception.
GRACE
Norma and Mel had a specific story about the world. To them, the world was steeped in Christianity, and guided by a specific set of rigid morals. In the wake of the progressive movements of the 60s and 70s, they felt America moving away from their values. They wanted to reintroduce their idea of how the world should be to the next generation.
And that idea — it ended up in children’s textbooks all over the country.
Which is something that their son, Jim, told me he is still grappling with today.
Jim Gabler:
So what I see is that if there were other people doing what my parents did that had a different mindset, then that would be more helpful to people calling through that to make a, a final decision in that process. So how do you bring in that-more diversity? And the problem is, is almost all of us have a constraint because there's-a lot of our mindset is shaped by our, our philosophy, our faith, um, our theology, things like that. And that becomes uncertain. And I don't-I think too many people were bothered by uncertainty. And I think we ought to be enamored with uncertainty. That's not to say one of us is right, the other is wrong.
GRACE
The philosophical distinction between Jim and his parents is very elegantly summed up in their differing views of certainty. Jim still identifies as a conservative Christian, and yet he’s able to say that we ought to be enamored with uncertainty. Which, when he said it, genuinely stunned me. His parents did not feel that way. They were deeply adverse to students learning critical thinking or any sort of lessons that involved introspection. They even protested against journaling assignments. All of this looking-inward was a sure fire way to lead kids away from God. Any uncertainty was too much uncertainty.
There’s one more textbook example I want to share that I think shows just how literal this attachment to certainty was. Joan told me about one science textbook that had a section about quantum physics.
Joan DelFattore:
And it talked about the uncertainty principle, meaning that you cannot predict with perfect certainty the movement of a particular particle in space. All you can do is generate a range of probabilities for where that particle will move next, but you can't pinpoint how a particle in space will move.
GRACE
I barely know what the uncertainty principle is, and I think that’s the case for most people who aren’t physicists. It’s hard to imagine why anyone who isn’t a physicist would take issue with this section of a textbook. But for those who fear uncertainty of any kind, even teaching this in a science classroom is too much of a risk.
Joan DelFattore:
If you teach children that there are no absolutes in math, they will think that there are no absolutes in morality and they will go and sell drugs on the street corner. That was the actual quote.
GRACE
Having one entirely agreed upon way of living, one totally accepted story about our past … that might seem comforting. Frictionless. But only for a certain kind of person.
Without that friction, that questioning, I think we also lose a lot as a society.
But in this textbook approval process, people wanted straightforward answers. They wanted certainty. And Mel and Norma Gabler provided that feeling of certainty.
They had impeccably prepared objections, well crafted arguments on TV, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the State Board of Education’s textbook approval process.
The more powerful Norma and Mel became, the easier it was to believe that they had the right answers. Which is not to say that they had the wrong answers.
As Norma said herself, the point was for everyone to have a voice in the textbook adoption process. Even if the result was their personal stranglehold of the textbook industry. In theory, they were pushing for a more democratic system.
But not everyone in the Gablers’ camp held that same vision.
Neal Frey:
I've never told anybody about, about, about the situation. Gablers and I, we were philosophically, always compatible. About the only thing we ever disagreed with was, was this: they wanted to motivate the mom and pop to the kitchen table. My viewpoint was the bottom 90% don't matter. If you reach the 10% elite, the 90% will follow.
GRACE:
Next week on Teaching Texas: the Gablers’ protegee Neal Frey infiltrates the Texas State Board of Education, and a liberal opposition mounts.
Teaching Texas is created by me, Grace Lynch. It’s produced by myself, and Adesuwa Agbonile. Our editor is Lindsey Kratochwill. Production Assistance by Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer. Original theme music by Chelsea Daniel.