Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
I heard a news story the other day that in California, textbooks are now forbidden to mention Mount Rushmore. See: http://www.wtvw.com/Global/story.asp?S=1288473
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.
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=16-1560253460-2
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.