THE TEXTWASH

THE TEXTWASH

 

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.

	“We are all products of our society”

 

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’.

by Victoria Taittinger