[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia for education

[Sheldon Rampton]

Jimmy Wales <jwales at 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.
-- 
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
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