Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
I heard a news story the other day that in
California, textbooks
are now forbidden to mention Mount Rushmore.
See:
Well...for starters, I'd personally recommend being
wary about any
information that comes from the blow-dried "talent"
on Fox News. In
any case, here's the "rest of the story":
(1) The news story above (by a woman named Ann
Moore, who apparently
does a regular feature called "The Moore You Know")
cites a number of
examples of alleged neutering of textbooks, all
seemingly for reasons
of leftist "political correctness," such as not
allowing the
representation of women as nurses, depictions of
junk food, etc.
However, she doesn't mention any specific textbooks
in which this has
happened.
(2) With regard to Mount Rushmore, the story is a
bit more
complicated than Moore's brief mention suggests.
Back in the days
when I was in school, my textbooks didn't mention
that the guy who
built Mount Rushmore was a leader in the Ku Klux
Klan. Here's a
discussion from a review of a book on the subject by
Jesse Larner:
There are complex stories behind those faces on
Mount Rushmore that
have been edited out of the guidebooks and
textbooks. There is the
story of how the land on which Rushmore stands was
expropriated from
the Lakota Sioux in 1877, abrogating a major
treaty. There is the
story of the sculpture's creator and
ideologue,
Gutzon Borglum, a
leader in the Ku Klux Klan, who saw in the
expansion of European
settlement across the American West the
fulfillment
of white racial
destiny. Rushmore is prefigured in the story of
Custer, who sealed
the fate of the Black Hills when he discovered
gold
there in 1874.
Larner traces the meaning and evolution of the
Custer battle
commemorations, and pursues the ways in which
Custer's defeat, the
killings at Wounded Knee, and Rushmore, are linked
in the story of
the Indians' loss of the Black Hills. Mount
Rushmore also traces
modern political uses of the monument, from Cold
War television
broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political
campaigns. It looks
at Rushmore's semi-religious status as the
national
shrine of
Democracy, and contrasts this with political
restrictions on the
practice of Indian religions in the Black Hills.
Finally, Larner
deals with previous works on Rushmore that have
avoided its message
of conquest, preferring to focus on a simplistic
narrative of
national glory. Even the tour guides at Rushmore
understand little
of its real history, or of the legal fact that the
land from which
it rises belongs to the Lakota.
Viewed in its full historical context, therefore,
this example
illustrates how the story of "censorship from
textbooks" involves a
whole lot more than the decision to mention or not
mention some
monument. My old school textbooks never mentioned
the genocide
against Native Americans, and judging from Larner's
account, it seems
that this is something that ought to be mentioned
when students learn
about Mount Rushmore -- unless, of course, we think
"history" should
consist solely of self-congratulatory propaganda.
(3) With regard to depictions of things like "junk
food,"
unfortunately there is no shortage of this in our
schools. Channel
One, a for-profit company, provides video equipment
and programming
to many cash-strapped schools throughout America, in
exchange for
which the schools have signed contracts promising to
show kids a
daily quota of TV commercials for companies like
Pizza Hut. There is
a long and sad story (which I will truncate here)
involving the use
of schools as marketing venues for fat- and
sugar-laden fast foods.
If anyone wants to know more about this, read Marion
Nestle's
excellent book, "Food Politics." (Nestle is a
nutritionist who bears
no relation to the chocolate company.) One school
got so carried away
by these promotional activities a few years back
that it actually
suspended a student for the "disruptive" thought
crime of wearing a
Pepsi T-shirt to a Coke Day rally. Here's an
interview with the
student that I personally found amusing:
http://www.fadetoblack.com/interviews/mikecameron/
The bottom line is that all sorts of forces --
commercial, political
and social -- take an interest in influencing the
way we educate our
youth. It isn't just coming from some "politically
correct" clique.
And should we expect or want things otherwise? I
think most of us
*hope* school boards would step in and exert
editorial oversight if a
textbook referred to black people as "niggers" or
described Hitler as
a great man. Judgments about appropriate content for
textbooks don't
qualify as "censorship," and different people are
bound to have
different views about what is and isn't appropriate.
Some people may
think that a decision not to mention Mount Rushmore
is absurd and
ridiculous. Outside our national cult of patriotism,
however, I
imagine some folks in Europe and elsewhere think it
is equally absurd
and ridiculous that Americans would revere a
mountain-sized statue of
the heads of dead presidents.
--
I'm lucky. I don't have to worry about censorship in
my social studies class. The textbooks (20 years old)
censor some (not as much as the modern, colorful
textbooks), but my social studies teacher fills in the
gaps. I also look things in Wikipedia that I learn
from social studies class if they sound funny.
--LittleDan
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