The first time I heard about one textbook per subject per pupil I thought, "Now that would be really great if it happened." Of course it will not happen for the same reason that no government, before or after 1994, has been able to claim that every child in every school has a textbook in every subject. The combination of official incompetence and the corruption of the textbook industry makes the breathless statement that the new policy will eliminate inequality just another rhetorical spurt by officials more occupied with political impression management.As a memorable line from an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study once put it, when the Department of Education runs out of ideas on how to do the real job of changing our dysfunctional schools, it finds solace in generating new policies.But there is something much more sinister behind this policy, as a panel at the Franschhoek Literary Festival revealed at the weekend. I am less interested in the impact on the publishing industry of this much-feared policy; there are other voices that speak more powerfully to that concern. What I am deeply worried about are the educational consequences.To begin with, the institutionalisation of low standards for education does not result from one policy; it comes through a slate of official actions (or inactions) that lower the temperature for educational performance to a point where the water is no longer comfortably cool. So, alongside the familiar standard-dropping decisions (the pass rate, automatic promotion etc) comes one textbook per subject.Think about this for a moment. Since when is all knowledge about biology or history reducible to one textbook? The best teachers use many textbooks from which to choose and distil the core concepts and methods they convey in an episode of teaching. In the best schools, children are taught two lessons about textbooks - that they contain important information and that they contain partial or incomplete information. Library and internet searches for information encourage pupils not to take a single authority as the sole "container" of the ideas to seek on evolution or business management or the interpretation of a poem.It is undemocratic to reduce the search for knowledge about a subject to a single, government-issued textbook. Yes, the government might consult panels of experts, but the state makes the final decision. I cannot think of a more dangerous curricular decision - the state effectively decides what you must know.Worse, children walk away from a textbook-driven lesson thinking that there are only three reasons for the Great Trek and those are the reasons given in the single textbook.Curriculum theorists like Michael Apple have loaded library shelves with books about the politics of textbooks; the argument is simple: a textbook is a political product and therefore inescapably partial and incomplete in what it conveys. Authors have prejudices, conscious and otherwise, in what they choose to put down in print. That is why teachers are equipped to choose from a diversity of texts and pupils are directed to multiple sources of textual authority to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that one text is the single authority on the subject.What we get with this new policy is simply another instance of the continuing deprofessionalisation of teachers by the removal of their power to choose the appropriate materials for the appropriate context and the appropriate class. Put bluntly, teachers are again assumed to be stupid automatons who need to be told what to do with what texts regardless of that complex ecology called the classroom.Here comes another policy that, contrary to the utopian pronouncements of officials, will actually deepen the divide between privileged schools and disadvantaged schools. Th e well-resourced schools will issue multiple texts for a subject by carrying over that cost to middle-class parents whose pockets can prevent the dumbing down of their kids through single-text instruction. Teachers in such schools will access multiple textbooks even if they are forced to draw pupils' attention to the government-issue for assessment purposes. In an educational sense, the poor are about to become poorer.All we can say about this one-textbook policy is that government will save a lot of money for itself, and some authors with political connections are about to become filthy rich...