While America
recovers from Sandy and sees a ‘New’ President into office, Asia fights over
rocks and France is in a tizz about competitiveness with its 'oh-so-normal’
president.
The textbooks
children learn from in school serve to shape their young minds and national
sentiments.
What goes in
textbooks and worse, what doesn’t, spurs controversy all over the globe, be it
for ethical, political or social reasons.
And so it
should. School is our first step into society and books remain a powerful
weapon. The Written Word with conviction is rarely forgotten.
Textbooks are
amongst the first books most people encounter, and in some countries, alongside
religious texts, the only ones.
A recent
study in South Africa, according to the
Economist, showed that fewer than half of pupils had access to more than
ten books at home. And Egypt’s Government found that excluding books given out
at school, “88% of Egyptian households read no books.”
From then
onwards, you can be perceived as a threat to any ideological value, a potential
destroyer of balance, an opposition to power… a danger.
And this is
why the degree to which a government keeps control of the textbooks used in
classrooms is a good, although imprecise, indication of its commitment to
ideological control.
Where that
yearning is strong, governments are likely to dot every “I” and cross every
“T”. And even when everything we see, hear or read isn’t meticulously
controlled by the government - with our best interest at heart - general
opinions and school boards influence the groups that control textbook writing.
It is not
surprising to note that the books likeliest to cause arguments are those
covering history or geography, maps and religion both being important areas of
dispute.
For example,
take Palestinian and Israeli textbooks: both countries give a bias account of
their history.
However they
do not incite violence or hate against one another, they simply fail to depict
today’s political reality.
George
Orwell’s 1984 infers that “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who
controls the present controls the past”. Winston’s soul purpose is to write and
rewrite history over and over again to keep the party’s glorious image clean
and free of contradiction.
War becomes
Peace, Peace becomes War; Lies become Reality and Reality become Lies.
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“We are all products of our society”
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Freethinkers
have always been seen as a danger by some - mostly by those who oppress - but
they play and have played a crucial role in matters of progress and change.
And those
non-patriotic freethinkers are exactly what Beijing tried to eliminate in Hong
Kong last July; tried but, thankfully, failed.
The Party attempted
to introduce a new curriculum of “national education”, which included new
history textbooks. Would you be surprised if I told you that, like on the
Mainland, both the Cultural Revolution and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square
were not to be spoken of in those ‘acceptable’ textbooks?
Where is the
World’s ‘example’ in all this mind control business? Ah yes… evolution is their
concern. Especially amongst Christian creationists who have long campaigned for
science textbooks to contain a religious alternative to evolution through
natural selection.
In Conservative
Upstate New York many textbooks remain silent on contraceptives and underline
that being sexually active “interferes” with students’ “values and family
guidelines”.
France has no
problem with man’s origins, but with economy.
Long have
French textbooks been criticized for their regard towards the “capitalist way
of doing things”, by largely favouring companies over entrepreneurs.
Ignorance is
terrible. But a mind filled with other people’s opinions, a mind filled with
other people’s thoughts, a mind like so many others… is worse.
We are all
products of our society.
There is no
escaping your childhood, what you learn day to day and hear minute to minute,
these are the things that supposedly ‘make’ us who we are, and control the
decisions we ‘make’.
Ah! Lucky are
we to call ourselves free.
But every
decision we make has a background, a foundation. Our decisions are founded on
things that we have assimilated as ours, but are truly just another piece of
the societal puzzle.
However, some
do realize this, and it is that same acknowledgment that makes them different
from another product, whereas others choose to react against society, which
makes them no different.
Therefore,
considering it is already bad enough that our thoughts escape our control, it
is clear that textbooks should remain widely un-opinionated and become
universal, so as to avoid further disseminating our so called ‘freedom’.
