Whoever holds the pen, that’s who. As we’ve all heard, there have been lots of protests (some turning violent) in China, over the version of history found in some Japanese school textbooks. As anyone who, like me is a fan of Zinn’s “A People’s History” knows, you must always remain vigilant against inaccuracies in history and social studies. Some desis in the D.C. suburbs have been doing just that. As reported in the Washington Post:
Fairfax County businesswoman Sandhya Kumar teaches her three daughters about other countries, cultures and religions. She wants them to take pride in their Indian heritage and Hindu faith — and to respect and understand other views.
But when Kumar of Lorton scanned several world history textbooks recommended for Fairfax County schools, she worried that students would come away with a distorted and negative impression of her homeland’s culture.
“I thought the American children will think India is some Third World country with pagan beliefs and backward thinking, not a forward-thinking country,” Kumar said.
She and dozens of other Indian American parents launched a campaign to change the way their history is taught in Fairfax, the nation’s 12th-largest school system. Their lobbying has prompted school officials to rethink presentations of India and Hinduism in classrooms and has sparked efforts to develop a more sophisticated and thoughtful curriculum.
So what in particular was inaccurate in the textbooks?
Balaji Hebbar, a George Washington University religion professor who was one of three scholars hired by Fairfax County to review the books cited by the group of Indian parents, said he and his colleagues found few factual errors. But he said the lessons boiled down a complex culture to “karma, cows and caste.”
“It’s as if I were making a picture book of the United States, and I took pictures of the bad parts of D.C., the run-down parts of New York City and the smoke stacks of Cleveland and left out the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty,” Hebbar said. “I would be telling the truth, but I would only be telling half the truth.”
The very open and gracious way in which the school district responded to the parent’s concerns is quite encouraging to me, especially in light of all the craziness that usually seems to undo the educational system in this country instead of helping it become better.
Heh – the first line of this comment sums up my opinion of Zinn –
The rest is pretty good as well –
Still, it’s cool to see more desi history in the books here. The highly selective / reductionist treatment of India reminds me of a recent story about HS kids who were surveyed about WWII and remembered –
But then again, Howard Zinn was probably happy with that particular history class.
The difference is that Americans have firsthand experience with American culture and not with Indian. There’s nothing counterbalancing the hippies-myths-poverty depiction.
Manish – lemme be clear – I think it’s a GOOD THING that the Indian parents do this.
I am NOT defending the “hippie / myth / poverty” portrayal. I’m just taking a few shots at Zinn
Good. The Zinn reference was a completely superfluous addition to this story. I just like to bait conservatives when I can 🙂
I’m glad this is getting some attention now. I remember getting into a knockdown drag-out with my teacher in a comparative history class in high school, when she claimed that Margaret Thatcher was the first woman in the world to be elected to lead a country. And then, when she finally relented, she had the nerve to say “Oh, I meant the Western world.”
And no, I still haven’t gotten over being educated in New Hampshire. 🙂
Allow me to gloat over the fact that after I tortured my wonderfully tolerant freshman world cultures teacher by correcting and elaborating on every single line he said about India and Hinduism, the humanities department at my high school responded by asking me to essentially TA that quarter of the class each year thereafter. 🙂
Obviously, bringing the South Asian perspective to world history textbooks is a good and natural process, but I think there’s a bigger problem afoot here: world history books in the U.S. don’t really give extensive treatment to any parts of the world except Western Europe. They’ve gotten a bit better about East Asia and Latin America, but Africa, the Middle East, and South/Southeast/Central Asia are all distilled down to what essentially amounts to bullshit, and the other non-European areas aren’t covered much better.
South Asia is a good point to focus on for now, having a billion people and all, but the problem goes well beyond South Asia, and some better textbooks are definitely in order. (I’m thinking they should commission Robert Kaplan myself: keep his historical accounts of Asia and Africa, and knock out his political predictions.)
One thought that just crossed my mind: Instead of a year of world history and a year of U.S. history, why not have kids do a year of ancient/medieval history, which would give them time to study all sorts of different cultures, and then spend a year looking at colonization, imperialism, and the contemporary era? That would allow all corners of the world to get some equal time, and also actually give kids an idea of how the world came to be as messed up as it is.
I mean, seriously, do we need a whole year for American history? It’s so damn short once you take out the Civil War battles, and merge the world wars in with European and Asian history.
Of course, this makes so much sense, public schools will never do it.
Joe: I totally used to think that too about American history, and was happy to pass out of it in college, but now I wish I had had more. Way more. As an American I think itt’s really useful when thinking about any kind of politics, economics, or policy.
Your medieval history idea is interesting. But it would still get dominated by western history, b/c that’s what American history departments historically study. I like it though b/c it’s much better understood for India. World history classes tend to get bogged down in murky antiquity and then skip over everything from 0 to 1800 CE. I think Medieval Indian history is a lot more relevant to modern India anyway, which is what kids need to understand.
Now there’s a curriculum that Howard Zinn would approve of — “There were all these beautiful cultures all around thew orld…. then contemporary colonization & imperialism by the white man hit them.”
Let’s not forget how almost no american schools teach that Turkey occupied Greece, that Egyptians are muslim, that Babylon became Iraq, that Taiwanese were citizens of Japan, that Canada, Australia, and New Zealand matriculated from Dominion to Realms of the Commonwealth, and that India was the first member of the Commonwealth to remove the Queen’s titular role in government (removing all vestige of allegiance and requiring a special amendment to the Commonwealth to let a member do so). In fact, with commerce superseding politics, it’s also a shame that almost no americans schools teach about the cayman islands, liberia, and the laws there and why so many companies register there and what implications result from it. The foreign exchange markets should be covered, that ‘earning a dollar a day’ isn’t literal, that there exists PPP, and the different standards to back currency (gold,silver,trade volume,fdi,etc). In fact, I cannot think of one important aspect of our history that is taught in secondary schools. Oh pfft, Henry Clay the great compromiser. Rosetta stone, fun. Pyramids, yay. No wonder Nauru can collapse (economically and literally due to severe mining on a fragile island), harbor Australian illegal immigrants indefinitely because treatment of illegals in Australian camps is too much of a hot potato, and yet not be noticed by anyone. Hooray for the world’s most ineffectual History curriculum, taught only by our public school system! Yeah, I have some strong thoughts about education and apathy.
Then again, despite an entire year dedicated to US History, few are taught what actually happened to the USS Maine, our adventuresome Intelligence agency’s games in South America that led to the UN finding us guilty of war crimes and liable to pay several billions in fines (which we haughtily ignore to pay or comment on), and of course the Tax System where we “temporarily” had a 0.5% civil war tax for funding, then a temporary single-digit WWI tax for funding, then FDR’s temporary WWII gradient tax system that was the first to cross 50% (and tax 90% of every penny earned above $1m/yr USD1940). Despite all the wars ending epochs ago, we still have 30-50% taxation! Something about budgets, the defense contractors who supply everything, and an analysis on lobbyists past and present would give people a far clearer picture of America than our current textbooks reveal. This belongs in an economics class, you say? Since when did History have to be solely about Politics? Teach the boring politics in a special Politics class. History should contain the economics, politics, and even science, that happened in the past which shaped our present or from which we can learn to shape our future. Why overlook engineering disasters like the Pinto, why overlook how sole marketing pushed the inferior electric GE Refridgerator to victory over the superior gas Kelvinator (which still lives on and is popular outside the hesperian world). Controversy surrounding the true inventors of technological innovations is also interestingly absent – as the english, french and russian all seem to have strong evidence in their favor that Edison stole european patents, repatenting them in America.