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Censorship and politics water
down textbooks January 14, 2004 Dunkirk social studies teacher Walter Robertson Students in Walter Robertson's global history class recently finished a lesson on Latin American independence - a topic his textbook covered in a single section of a chapter. "I'm supposed to teach about this region with over half a billion people," said Robertson, a member of the Dunkirk Teachers Association in Chautauqua County. "It's mind boggling when you have an entire chapter on the French Revolution. Is one nation more important than a continent?" Robertson chairs the New York State United Teachers Subject Area Committee on Social Studies. The committee is concerned that texts are overly Eurocentric. Another concern is that textbooks offer only a watered-down version of history by including too many stray bits of information on many topics. "While teachers are increasingly using documents and primary sources outside of their textbooks to add depth to their lessons, it's still crucial to make sure textbooks are solid," said NYSUT First Vice President Antonia Cortese. Language police Under pressure from parent groups and the political extremes, the $4 billion educational publishing industry has sanitized the learning materials they offer to schools, said Diane Ravitch, an education professor at New York University. Ravitch explores the effects of textbook censorship and politics on learning in her most recent book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. Following industry standards, publishers avoid words, images or topics they deem offensive or inappropriate. "Censors of the left wing believe that kids should read only about the world as it should be, not as it is," Ravitch said. Right-wing censors wish to control topics, and hold that everything students read should model certain moral behaviors. James Bernat, a member of the North Warren TA in the Adirondacks, sees the effects of the practice in his classroom texts. "Anything politically controversial is cut out," Bernat said, a seventh- and 12th-grade teacher. "When you can read an entire textbook that includes the Revolutionary War and it has only three paragraphs on George Washington, then I think some of the meat has been stripped out." Ravitch questioned the implications of censorship on the study of history while speaking at an American Federation of Teachers conference last year. "In some current textbooks, Mao Tse-Tung wasn't a dictator but someone who listened to people and built bridges," she said. Textbook publishers aren't alone in their attempts to clean up what students read. The New York State Education Department was forced to end its politically correct editing process in 2002 when a parent found several test passages had been altered on the English Regents Exam. Commissioner Richard Mills said tests would no longer be edited to delete potentially offensive words or phrases. Bland texts Many texts leave much to the imagination. "We know that within less than a century 90 percent of Native Americans died from contact with Europeans and in the Columbian age," Robertson said. "When you read that it's simply a statistic. You don't read about some of the things that must have been going through their minds as their prayers and remedies failed them." "The curriculum is so broad it has become very shallow," Bernat said. "Students don't get all the differing opinions. It's simply a survey course substituted in its place." Teachers go to primary sources to enliven the curriculum. Laying aside the textbook, Bernat has students read the actual text of the Mayflower Compact. "It's better to look at it and take the kids through the process of how it was written in the 1600s." Until textbooks become more reliable sources, Bernat suggests new teachers turn to veteran colleagues, university libraries and online sources. - Clarisse Butler |
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