DEATH OF A CITIZEN (via Kevin Whited):

Textbook critic dies, leaving noted career (KATHERINE SAYRE, December 21, 2004, Longview News Journal)

Mel Gabler, a nationally-known conservative textbook critic who emphasized accuracy and a Christian perspective in examining school children's books, died Sunday. He was 89.

Gabler and his wife, Norma, started reviewing classroom textbooks for accuracy and content more than 40 years ago after finding errors in one of their son's textbooks in 1961.

The couple founded the nonprofit Educational Research Analysts, a conservative Christian-focused group, to examine textbooks up for adoption by the Texas State Board of Education and became familiar voices to state board members and textbook publishers.

"There's no way of knowing a total impact of it, but certainly publishers have had to exercise a lot more editorial responsibility than they would have if Mr. Gabler had not done the work he did," said Neal Frey, a senior textbook analyst for the Gablers' group.

The Gablers garnered national media attention throughout their careers, making an annual roll sheet of the number of factual errors found in history, math, science and other books each year. In 1973, they asked why in one history book, movie star Marilyn Monroe received six pages in a history book while the United States' first president George Washington had a few paragraphs.

In 1992, Texas fined textbooks publishers about $1 million for hundreds of errors the Gablers found in 10 U.S. history books after publishers and the state had approved them.

Last month, the Gablers' research group was at the forefront of a successful effort in Austin to force textbook publishers to define marriage as a lifelong union between a man and a woman. The group had objected to, among other things, references to unspecific "married partners."

MORE:
A Journalist’s Tribute to Mel Gabler (George Archibald, 12/21/2004, CWA)

Mel and Norma were the seeds of a veritable parent revolution for school improvement who used the Texas process for textbook adoption to press their case for accuracy and fairness in teaching our country's heritage -- all of it -- to our children. They stood almost alone for decades in building a grassroots parent movement in favor of textbooks and school curriculum that upheld decent social standards, basic principles of decentralized government that safeguard every person's individual freedom, the religious basis of our society that the liberal-left nihilists have tried so hard to censor from teaching and learning in our schools, and basic academic freedom and honesty.

For decades, they and their allies questioned public school practices from a Christian conservative point of view. Mel and Norma stood against a self-proclaimed “religion” that called itself “secular humanism,” which through academic and education establishment proponents worked itself into K-12 school curriculum and textbooks in the 1960s and '70s.

Well-financed advocates of secular humanism took on the Gablers, attacked them in professional educator publications, books written by college professors and graduate students, and in federally-funded congressional studies and testimony, but did not beat them.