|
Press Release
September 17, 1997/New York, NY
Today the Council on Families releases its new report, Closed Hearts, Closed Minds: The Textbook Story of Marriage, an evaluation of the nation's twenty leading college-level
textbooks on marriage and family life.
"These textbooks are a national embarrassment," the report concludes. It continues, "Many of the textbooks are so deficient that students who take courses in which they are used
are likely to complete the courses more ill-informed about important family issues than when they began."
Why Textbooks Matter
Textbooks matter because they inform the professionals who are the custodians of the family as an institution. Each semester, these books are used in approximately 8,000 college courses across
the country and read by hundreds of thousands of college students who are likely to view them as authoritative. The college instructors who are training the next generation of counselors,
nurses, therapists, social workers, and teachers often rely on precisely these books for their own understanding of the scientific consensus on family matters.
Other Findings:
- Family textbooks are almost twice as likely to devote space to the topic of "swinging" than to the relationship between family structure and juvenile crime.
- Family textbooks display remarkably little interest in the effects of marital disruption or single parenting on children, devoting an average of only 3.5 pages to this topic.
- Just 24 of 338 total chapters in these textbooks deal with family effects on children. Three times as much space is devoted to adult relations, without regard to how they affect children.
- Current textbooks convey a pessimistic view of view of marriage. These books repeatedly suggest that marriage is more a problem than a solution. The potential costs of marriage to adults receive
exaggerated treatment, while the benefits of marriage, both to individuals and society, are downplayed.
- Current textbooks are riddled with glaring errors, distortions of research, omissions of important data, and misattributions of scholarship.
- Of the books examined, the two worst are Contemporary Families and Relationships, by John Scanzoni, and Changing Families, by Judy Aulette. The best is Public and Private Families, by Andrew Cherlin.
Professor Glenn stated:
"As someone who has taught undergraduate marriage and the family courses for twenty years, I was certainly aware that these textbooks have shortcomings. But what I found was worse than I had
expected.
In fact, often what is presented in these books as an "expert consensus" is sharply at odds with much of the weight of social science evidence. The result is a one-sided story of
marriage that seriously downplays the importance of marriage in benefiting adults and protecting children."
About the Author
Professor Norval D. Glenn is one of our nation's leading family scholars. Glenn is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Sociology and Stiles Professor in American Studies at the University of Texas at
Austin. He is a former editor of both the Journal of Family Issues and Contemporary Sociology, and has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Marriage and the Family since 1979.
About the Council on Families
The Council on Families is comprised of eighteen nationally prominent scholars and family experts who have come together to form an on-going program of collaborative research, interdisciplinary
deliberation, and public education on major issues of family well-being.
Back to Top | Media Coverage | Read the report
|
