Teacher to Parent U by Betty Condie (iHMHBHHHHi 'Dumbed-down' texts are invading schools You may be in for a shocking surprise sur-prise if you pick up your child's textbook text-book and take a closer look at it. Poor writing, poor organization and . oversimplification have led to "dumbed-down" texts which offer little challenge to students or even hold their interest. . Millions of textbooks made spiritless and shallow by "dumbing down" have been dumped on the market. Many of them end up in our schools. Overreliance on "readability formulas" for-mulas" that require publishers to cite for each book its reading level has robbed prose of the connective" tissue that makes it comprehensible, as well as the style that makes it interesting. in-teresting. Tailoring textbook language to the lowest comprehension level may be helpful to early readers to teach kids how to read, but it does little to make them want to read. Choppy writing and awkwardly simple vocabulary in textbooks may help explain why some students don't want to read them. A typical sixth-grade social studies text, for example, covers everything from ancient China through the geography of all the . continents, through to the invasion of Grenada all in 500 pages. Pages are covered with one-sentence one-sentence concepts. Paragraphs are made up of lists of facts, dates and times. A theme to tie the facts togeher into meaningful ideas is often missing. . In addition to "dumbed-down" books, school children may also be. reading "bowdlerized" texts. These are texts which have been cut and censored often without notation to the teacher or student. One Virginia school teacher found 404 lines had been slashed from a texbook version of Romeo and Juliet and the word "inalienable" had been cut from the Declaration of Independence In-dependence in another text. If you are more aware of what is in your child's textbooks, you will begin to look more carefully at them and then speak to your local school board about the quality of those texts. If we all complain about "dumbed-down" and "bowdlerized" textbooks, publishers will begin to get the message.