In: Psychology
Derthick states on page 63, “At least when I was growing up, textbooks in American government routinely portrayed Congress as being highly sensitive to the interests of state and local governments. What has happened to change this?
Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.
(Answer) In the statement above, Derthick is not really commenting on the state of Congress in the United States but, rather on the way elements are presented in textbooks. In this day and age, if a textbook would have an erroneous or biased piece of information, it would be fairly simple to simply look up the information online.
Furthermore, since the internet is the information highway, it would be easy to also have discussion boards about the nature of a particular book and what the information entails. Because of such amenities, it is crucial for textbooks to stick to facts and not contaminate chapters with opinions or perceptions.
That is why the American government has probably chosen to portray Congress in the exact way as it is. This would avoid contention and dissatisfaction amongst educators and parents as to what their children were being taught at schools.