The textbooks children learn from in school reveal and shape national attitudes—and should provoke debate.
PARISIANS are in a tizz about capitalism. New Yorkers get stressed
about sex. In Seoul and San Antonio, Texas, 11,000km apart, citizens
fret about the relationship between humans and apes. What goes into
school textbooks—and, even more, what is left out—spurs concern and
controversy all over the world.
And so it should. Few, if any, instruments shape national culture
more powerfully than the materials used in schools. Textbooks are not
only among the first books most people encounter; in many places they
are, along with religious texts, almost the only books they encounter. A
study in South Africa showed that fewer than half of pupils had access
to more than ten books at home. In 2010 a study by Egypt’s government
found that, apart from school textbooks, 88% of Egyptian households read
no books.
The degree to which a government keeps control of the textbooks used
in classrooms is a good, if imprecise, guide to its commitment to
ideological control. Where that yearning is strong, governments are
likely to produce the texts themselves or define minutely what goes into
them. But even when governments are less directly involved, ideology
can count—either the ideology of the groups that control
textbook-writing, or of those that seek, through school boards and the
like, to constrain them. Such manoeuvres can short-circuit the healthy
debate that societies should encourage over how the world is taught to
children, screening out views that offend or challenge those who wield
the blue pencils of power.
Watching the Wahhabis
America’s State Department employs people to keep an eye on other
countries’ textbooks, in an effort to understand better how their people
think and what their governments want them to think. Other countries
probably do the same. So too, in its own way, does the Georg Eckert
Institute, a centre for textbook research in the small German town of
Braunschweig. It is a measure of how sensitive the subject can be that
even this independent institution must struggle to get copies of
textbooks from many places. Nonetheless, it has gathered samples from
160 countries. Simone Lässig, the institute’s director, says the most
contentious are books covering history and geography, especially when
they include maps, though religion is a growing area of dispute.
Other people’s textbooks have long been a source of worry. After the
first world war, the League of Nations sought to make them less
nationalistic. Anxieties increased, though, after the attacks on America
on September 11th 2001, when some in both America and Saudi Arabia,
including officials, supposed that Saudi Arabia’s curriculum of
intolerance was responsible, at least in part, for the emergence of
al-Qaeda’s brutal brand of jihad. Buffeted by
the criticism, Saudi rulers promised reform. From King Abdullah down,
Saudis have insisted repeatedly that the intolerant bits of their
teaching materials have been removed. But in a stubbornly autocratic
country that adheres to a puritanical Wahhabism, there is a lot of
intolerance to go round.
The Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA), a think-tank and human-rights
lobby in Washington, DC, reports that much of the material that provoked
fury in the West after September 2001 is still used in Saudi classrooms
today. Ali al-Ahmed, director of the IGA and author of a forthcoming
work on Saudi textbooks, cites such examples as “The Jews and Christians
are enemies of the believers”, and “The Jews occupied Palestine with
the help of the crusaders’ malevolence towards Islam… But the Muslims
will not remain silent”. The Saudi education minister says the books are
being revised—but that it will take another three years. Mr Ahmed says
change is not happening sooner “because the state would be putting its
survival at risk. The purpose of education is to ensure social obedience
to the ruler.”
Sometimes the requirements of the state are more clearly seen in what
textbooks leave out. In George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four”, the
Party proclaimed that “Who controls the past controls the future; who
controls the present controls the past”, and something similar seems to
hold true in Beijing. Whole chunks of the past are erased from China’s
textbooks, leaving history thoroughly sanitised. The official term in
high-school textbooks for the famine that followed the Great Leap
Forward in 1958 is “Three Years of Economic Difficulty”; although poor
harvests are mentioned, the 30m deaths found in estimates from outside
China go unrecorded. Earlier editions of the textbooks contained a brief
section on “The Political Disturbance of 1989”—the euphemism for the
Tiananmen protests—but these were removed when the textbook was revised
in 2004. The “Disturbance” has now been extirpated from Chinese history
lessons, lest any pupils feel inspired to cause another.
One country, one textbook
In Hong Kong tens of thousands of people, mustered mostly by a group
of youngsters called Scholarism, started protesting in July against a
plan by the Hong Kong government, prompted by Beijing, to introduce a
new curriculum of “national education”, which would include new history
textbooks. These, the Chinese hoped, would help to foster the sort of
patriotism they want to see in the semi-self-governing city (see Banyan).
As in the books used on the mainland, the events of the Cultural
Revolution and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square were notable by their
absence. The books also denigrated democracy, while praising the
one-party system. Hong Kong’s protests ended in September after its
chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, backed down: a victory for the
protesters, making it highly unlikely that the government will try such a
plan again.
None of this has blunted Chinese vigilance about perceived
shortcomings in textbooks elsewhere. China and other countries have long
excoriated Japan for the way its textbooks whitewash the country’s
history, in particular glossing over Japanese war crimes. (The
government does not write the textbooks; it merely approves them for
use.) The “New History Textbook”, for example, written by a group of
conservative scholars, is the result of a backlash in Japan against the
“masochistic” way history was taught in the decades after the second
world war. The version that was submitted for government approval in
2000 played down Japan’s aggression in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95
and the occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, and avoided mention
of the use of sex slaves by its armies or the rape of Nanjing. It was
subsequently published in a less strident form, and is still in use—but
only in a tiny number of schools.
In America most of the disputes about textbooks are home-grown.
Liberals worry that their children are being taught a nationalistic
version of history that emphasises the wonders of industrialisation and
plays down slavery and the slaughter of Indian tribes. By contrast,
conservatives complain about insufficient patriotism and too much
secularism. In 2010 the Texas board of education managed to remove
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, from the
state’s list of important revolutionary figures, apparently because of
Jefferson’s insistence on the separation of church and state. He was,
however, swiftly reinstated.
California and Texas tend to dominate such debates. These two big
states have dictated the content of textbooks for the past 30 years, one
feeding liberal teachers’ appetites, the other the conservatives’. In
Texas, with 10% of America’s schoolchildren, textbook publishers have
been keen to accommodate the preferences of the state board of
education, and school districts themselves prefer not to put their heads
above the parapet. Since 2009, however, Texas has given school
districts more latitude to pick between hard-copy textbooks approved by
the board and other materials, such as those found online; and the state
has little authority, in any case, to make school districts follow its
guidelines.
Sex education is a case in point. Five years ago, almost all Texas
schools were teaching abstinence-only, knowing that this was what the
state preferred. Now, however, about a quarter of the school districts
have moved to more comprehensive sex education, after hearing that this
was what parents wanted.
Darwin, sex and other worries
Sex seems a particularly American difficulty. In September the New
York Civil Liberties Union published a study on sex education in schools
in conservative upstate New York. The research showed that all the most
commonly used health textbooks are stubbornly silent on the subject of
condoms or other contraceptives as methods of preventing pregnancy or
sexually transmitted diseases. Teachers are allowed to add their own
materials and say what they want in class; but they must still teach
from textbooks that warn pupils that being sexually active “interferes
with your values and family guidelines” and counsel them that abstinence
is a sign of good character.
In America creationists—mostly of the Christian variety—have long
campaigned for textbooks to include alternatives to evolution by natural
selection as an account of the natural world and human origins. They
are not the only ones. In June a campaign led by the Society for
Textbook Revise (STR) appeared to have succeeded in persuading South
Korea’s textbook publishers to remove certain references to evolution.
The umbrella group responsible for the STR includes the Somang Church,
one of a number of evangelical churches and megachurches that are
increasingly active in Korean politics.
The STR’s shenanigans led to uproar (although Christianity is growing
in South Korea, a sizeable number of people declare no religious
affiliation at all). The government has now set up a panel, led by the
Korean Academy of Science and Technology and including biologists and
palaeontologists, to oversee any changes to science books. The committee
stressed that evolution was a part of modern science that all children
must study. The STR, which sees its exclusion from the committee as a
sign of bias, says it will fight on.
In avowedly secular France evolution causes no problems. But
economics does. For years the French seemed quite blasé about economics
textbooks that were filled with unreconstructed Marxism. Peter Gumbel, a
British journalist and academic who has studied the French educational
system, says such books sat happily with the idea that rampant economic
liberalism was responsible for France’s weakness in the run-up to the
second world war. French textbooks today are rather subtler, but still
not much in favour of the capitalist way of doing things.
As president, Nicolas Sarkozy made a stab at reforming economics
teaching. In 2008 there was an official “audit” of the economics
textbooks, particularly focused on the way markets and enterprise were
portrayed. But a committee set up to discuss improving the teaching of
economics and business to French schoolchildren was disbanded after a
few years. A new study of 400 pages of high-school economics textbooks,
by the Institute of Economic and Fiscal Research, reveals that only a
dozen are devoted to companies, and none to entrepreneurs.
Not all accusations against textbooks should be taken at face value,
though. In December last year Newt Gingrich, then a candidate for the
Republican presidential nomination in America, said Palestine had
textbooks “that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how
many Jews are left?” In 2007 Hillary Clinton blasted Palestinian
textbooks for teaching children to glorify death and violence. But a
report by the State Department in 2010 concluded that Palestinian
textbooks merely showed “imbalance, bias, and inaccuracy”, and failed
accurately to depict today’s political reality; they did not incite
violence against Jews.
Samira Alayan, a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute, says that
Palestinian history textbooks do not deny that Jews have lived in
Palestine throughout history. Rather, the books written by the
Palestinian Authority since the 1990s often shy away from awkward
questions. The authors cannot decide whether to portray Palestine as
they understand it historically, Palestine as they hope it may emerge
from a settlement with Israel, or the messy reality on the ground that
changes from year to year. Many maps are kept historical or
topographical to avoid having to draw contentious political boundaries;
others mark the West Bank and Gaza in different colours or with dotted
lines, but do not say what the divisions mean.
The strongly nationalistic flavour of Palestinian textbooks is not
surprising, says Nathan Brown, a political scientist at George
Washington University, when an entity has been born in conflict with
another state. Nor are Israeli textbooks without fault. Nurit Peled of
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has studied Israeli textbooks
covering history, geography and civics, says that in the books she has
looked at Palestinians, when they appear at all, are depicted as
refugees, farmers or terrorists—never as doctors or engineers, or any
other sort of professional.
Between 2003 and 2008 the Georg Eckert Institute worked with the
Peace Research Institute in the Middle East to produce a joint textbook
of recent Israeli and Palestinian history that could be used by schools
on both sides. It was, says Ms Lässig, “very, very difficult”. The
result was a book in which the same events were told from Israeli and
Palestinian perspectives on opposite pages—with a wide central gutter in
which pupils could write their own responses to the contrasting
versions. So far, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have
officially adopted it.
Kalashnikov arithmetic
To find textbooks that live up to Mr Gingrich’s claims, you need to
consider a conflict a little further back in time. In Afghan refugee
camps in the 1980s, children were confronted with mathematical problems
like this: “One group of mujahideen attack 50
Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians were killed. How many
Russians fled?” New books are lighter on the AK-47 as a teaching aid—but
as in Israel and Palestine, the question of how to present recent
history has been a touchy one.
The Afghan authorities say they want to present the history of the
past three decades merely as a series of events. No blame is assigned,
says Attaullah Wahidyar, an adviser to the ministry of education. “The
players of the past 30 years are still players in Afghan politics
today,” he explains. To include evaluations of recent historical events
would make education a political minefield. “We are not ready to take
that risk at this stage. We are working on nation-building and on
state-building,” insists Mr Wahidyar. “Analysing our recent history will
not help us in this. We do not want schools to be places where children
start fighting over Afghanistan’s history.” Religion, too, is a tricky
area. The country’s new textbooks, says Mr Wahidyar, still explain
Islamic beliefs and practices, such as how to pray and how to perform
ablutions. But there is nothing objectionable about that. And, he
continues, books have become more balanced than they were under the
Taliban.
Similar revisions and difficulties will face other countries in
conflict, or undergoing a transition from one form of government to
another. Libya, for example, needs a new range of textbooks, not only
because children can no longer be taught that the will of the masses is
infallibly expressed through the “peoples’ committees”—which have
disappeared since Muammar Qaddafi fell—but also because of Qaddafi’s
insistence that, in the cause of pan-Arab unity, maps of the region
should show no national borders.
Fortunately, the spread of digital technology makes such revisions
easier—even if it does nothing to resolve disagreements over what
revisions should be made. The days when textbooks were covered with the
scrawl of pupils in long-ago classrooms may be coming to an end. Digital
books, which can be updated cheaply and often, will probably come to
replace their paper counterparts. Some school systems are already
embracing this. In September California’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed a
bill to create a website where students can download popular college
textbooks free of charge.
As long as textbooks in one form or another are used, says Ms Lässig,
and as long as they are issued or approved by the state, they will
remain a political issue. But as access to other texts is enjoyed more
widely, some of the dominance they now enjoy will wane.
As indeed will the power of teachers—whose prejudices may often be
just as ingrained as those found in textbooks, and rather harder to pin
down. Henning Hues, a researcher at the Georg Eckert Institute, has
studied South African textbooks and teaching. In one class he observed, a
book issued since the rise to power of the African National Congress
featured a picture of Nelson Mandela with, alongside it, a question
about why the country’s first black president was a hero. The teacher, a
white Afrikaans-speaker a few years away from retirement, ignored the
task set and described Mr Mandela as an armed guerrilla and assassin.
A trip to Wikipedia by way of a smartphone will not necessarily let
children work their way out of such dichotomies. But it will help.
from the print edition
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