主题：【文摘】北美独立战争: 美国人编出来的神话 -- 李根

For example, if you teach Economics, there are at least 20 textbooks available in the market (check amazon.com) written by different professors at different schools. Some are more pro-free market, some are more neutral, some are of Keynesian school thus more in favor of governmental regulation and intervention.

Coverage of classical economics is very similar, but when it comes to modern topics, the differences start to appear in different textbooks.

At university level, textbook selection is the POWER OF PROFESSOR who teaches one specific course, not of administrative staff or school president. If administration intervenes, it will be perceived as interference of academic freedom with backlash from many professors.

BTW, Marx political economics is still taught at some schools, though not in the mainstream.

So it is common that 12 universities can use 12 different textbooks and publishers/authors compete against each other.

As to the high-school level(public sector), US does have federal level department of education, but with limited power. The school book selection is in the hand of local educational board who get its finance through real estate tax (China should collect this tax too so that local gov. do not have to sell land to get ONE-TIME concession to finance local government expenditure).

As to private high-school, of course, government can say nothing in terms of textbook selection. But keep in mind: you can not teach useless religious fundamentalism stuff because no mid-class parents want to pay hard-earned after-tax 20-30k per year for this kind of useless crap.

That's why it is very difficult to implement federal-level educational reform. You can try to talk to different groups to get more and more consensus, but do not expect uniform textbook/syllabi...

What Americans excel is self-governance, that's a 250-year tradition. You will see that if you live in one place long enough.