Musty Tomes Full of Trouble

School textbooks are meant to educate the young. Mind you, when I was young, I used to hate my textbooks with a vengeance. The best time was when the final examinations used to be over and I could bid adieu to those textbooks, which had been the bane of my school year. The thud, which greeted the schoolbag being chucked into the corner, was ever so satisfying to my soul. Now that I have children who study from textbooks, I have a vested interest in them. Besides that, there is another concern I have with textbooks. Away from the high profile counter terror effort, there is a slightly less heated discussion going around, about how textbooks are, by themselves, a cause of perpetuating hate, intolerance, terror, mis-information and the like. Over the past six months, I have read about controversies regarding textbooks in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, USA, India, China, Japan, Israel, and Palestine, Pakistan, just to speak of a few countries. Let us explore, shall we?

I could personally attest to the differences between what I was taught when I was a callow youth and what I learnt once I grew older. For example, 1857 was taught to us as the first war of Indian Independence, but in the UK, it is called as the Great Mutiny of 1957. The Black Hole of Calcutta was a complete mystery to me growing up in India, but I came to know about it when I arrived to the UK. On speaking with my friends and colleagues from Pakistan, I realized that the very same war was looked upon not as the first war of independence, but the time that the Muslims in British India lost their political and social power (mainly because the Mughal Emperor was overthrown and the British Crown took direct responsibility for India as its dominion). Mind you, I cannot really blame the textbooks, I was best described as an indifferent student - how can one concentrate on musty old history when one has suddenly discovered that strange, mysteriously enchanting new species called as females.

Textbooks, in the post-colonial framework, are the most important measure of establishing the national myth/ideology or framework of the national founders. The students accept what is in the textbooks and the impact of the contents lasts for generations. For decades before independence in 1947, the British Indian education system was oriented on the Macaulay model fit to churn out clerks and basic administrators, fitting into the British Empire model of governance and administration. Post independence, we clearly saw the difference between the educational systems implemented in Pakistan and India.

While the commonality was that both countries tried to make a clean break from the past, India went down the secular, nationalistic, engineering, scientific inclusive (and dare I say, socialist based upon Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s personal proclivities) model. Pakistan, on the other hand, went down the religiously oriented, ideologically specific route.

Sixty years on, the results are there to see. India’s graduates are the storm troopers of the IT, outsourcing, engineering, medical and financial world, confident in their national outlook, historical background and educational foundation. On the other hand, (and I have to admit this is my personal opinion and there are very many exceptions), I frequently find Pakistani graduates as being defensive, unable to reconcile national Pakistani history with its perennial search for its identity/ideology and often hung up on religion.

However, history in both countries is a tough one indeed. We find major quarrels over the Indian textbooks. The treatment of minorities, the treatment of the Muslim invasions, treatment of the origins of Indians, conversions, language, the treatment of Hindu religion and other religions are all very contentious. When the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, it attempted to re-write the national curriculum and textbooks. The Boston Globe wrote on June 1, 2003 in an article titled ’Textbook Troubles: India’s Hindu Nationalists Rewrite Their Country’s Past-Conveniently’: "In 1998, the BJP won national elections and began taking control of the country’s leading scholarly bodies. A national curriculum for schools run by the central government was proposed the same year, with the objective of replacing history textbooks by the country’s most reputed scholars, many of whom have a secular or left wing orientation. In May 2002, the education ministers of 16 states walked out of a conference to protest the right-wing bias of the new curriculum, while three leading scholar-activists filed a petition with the Supreme Court challenging the publication of new textbooks. The petition was turned down, however, and ’’India and the World’’ and ’’Contemporary India’’ made their appearance...." When the BJP was turfed out of power, the opposition tried to undo the changes.

It is not only in India that this fight is currently being fought. In a strange leap of geography, a huge brouhaha is currently brewing in California, USA over the treatment of Hinduism, with protagonists of change alleging wrongful treatment of Hinduism and with antagonists in turn accusing them of pandering to an exclusionary, propagandist and a cleansed Hindu only viewpoint. The case is still under discussion, but it just shows how divisive textbooks can be. In a few weeks, I hope to return to this topic. Mind you, I do still think that we are still under the influence of the Macaulay orientation, the pride and knowledge that should really come from such a long and rich civilization is not really portrayed in the current Indian education system. Where is the emphasis on Aryabhatta? Bhaskaracharya? Panini? Where is the concentration on Sanskrit? Why are we not more open in our history and give examples of inter-faith harmony? Why are we not a bit clearer about regions that seem to have been forgotten like the North East Region? Why this underlying assumption that only the Greco Roman epistemological framework is the best or the only one? However, enough now of my personal moaning!

On the other side of the equation, we have a report authored by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute of Pakistan (www.sdpi.org), which notes that the Pakistani school textbooks have the following issues (and I quote), "Inaccuracies of fact and omissions that serve to substantially distort the nature and significance of actual events in our history; Insensitivity to the existing religious diversity of the nation; Incitement to militancy and violence, including encouragement of Jihad and Shahadat; Perspectives that encourage prejudice, bigotry and discrimination towards fellow citizens, especially women and religious minorities, and other towards nations; A glorification of war and the use of force; Omission of concepts, events and material that could encourage critical self-awareness among students...". One wonders if it would make sense to get the Pakistani authors to review Indian textbooks and vice versa. Maybe not so soon, but this has been done in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example by a team of academics and teachers who reviewed both sides’ books, using a common set of criteria which comply with UNESCO’s standards for textbook analyses and the Israel/Palestine Centre for Research and Information reviewed Palestinian textbooks for the Tolerance Education Program to change them to be, and I quote: "in line with the concept of tolerance and the principles of cooperation, peaceful coexistence and the constructive resolution of conflicts." If it is possible to arrive at some sort of compromise between the Palestinians and Israelis then I am sure the same can be achieved between India and Pakistan. Before you think everything is hunky dory in the Middle East, its not so. Textbooks are still very contentious.

Textbooks were used by both sides, to a far greater degree than India and Pakistan, in trying to push their own national agendas. For example, Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University studied school textbooks on grammar and Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. As the good professor posits, the over-riding idea is that the Palestinians did not take care of the land, so they do not deserve it and there are good historical reasons for Jews to live in the land, basically pushing the Zionist agenda. The textbooks stereotyped the Arabs as (and I quote) "unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic." Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were "tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, coloured" and "they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed." Nice one, eh? Things are getting better now with a lot of work being done to reduce some of the more glaring aspects on both sides, but there is still a long way to go.

Mind you, the situation is not good on the other side. Palestinian textbooks are almost like a mirror image of the old Israeli textbooks. Glorification of jihad, martyrdom, convoluted reasoning given for Palestinian and Arab defeats, denigration of the Jews and Israel, an emphasis on rote learning, and even conspiracy theories galore. Mind you, it is not a state yet, well, I do not know what the Palestinians have right now or how to call it, but maybe it is too soon to expect them to have a well balanced textbook selection.

Look what happened in Japan. Every four years, the Japanese ministry of education asks for textbook proposals, vets them, asks for changes if required and then schools are able to pick them up for their students. In 1982, the ministry asked one of the textbook authors to write of the Japanese army’s "advance into" China instead of its "aggression in" China and of "uprising among the Korean people" instead of the "March First Independence Movement." Interesting shades of the 1857 Indian mutiny, no? Similarly, we have seen near riots, protests and demonstrations in China and South Korea over the treatment of World War II in Japanese textbooks. The recent football world cup (jointly held by Japan and South Korea) also was hit by the textbook spat.

World War II is still an issue within the US textbook system, with quite a lot of noise still emanating from people who talk about the internment and racist behaviour towards Japanese Americans (see any parallels with the Americans who have been imprisoned in the war of terror?) We also have other issues around the treatment of American Indians, the civil war, glorification of ilitary victories and down grades of the cost of civilian lives, the Philippines war, presence or absence of Christianity, and the rather strange issue of creationism versus intelligent design versus evolution. Frankly, the last one is simply gob-smacking and rather amusing to read. There you have it. Sacred myths are no respecter of traditions; China is going to amend its textbooks after realizing that the long held fact that the Great Wall of China is not visible from space was blown when Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei candidly said that he could not see the wall at all.

Russia is going to withdraw a textbook, which is critical of President Putin, and Jordan is going to refresh its textbooks so that glorification of violence and terror is no longer in print. Iraq has completely rejigged its textbooks so that the cult of Saddam Hussein is no longer visible, while Europe’s textbooks are curiously sanitized of the sheer blood and mayhem, which characterize much of its history. Cambodian school teachers actually want all mention of God removed from the textbooks and Thailand does not like the explicit sexual tones in a sex education textbook. Serbian textbooks have now removed most, if not all mention of Slobodan Milosevic and Iran wants to update the way women are portrayed in their textbooks. British sex education textbooks are considered to be utterly boring and dull (which rather explains the fact that UK has one of the highest number of teenage pregnancies in Europe, surely you prefer to go have sex rather than read a boring book).

What is really required from textbooks is something, which is mutually exclusive and has inconsistencies. The first objective behind a textbook is to provide a sense of national history or group identity. The second objective is to make the student think and form an individual opinion and identity as well. As can be seen, these two objectives are at variance. Most of the above mentioned issues, curses and problems with textbooks are around the first objective. Some groups want a particular group identity and the others do not like that, hence all the fighting, accusations and heated talks. In all this huge blah blah blah, what gets lost is the concentration on trying to make the student think, to make students into good citizens, to know there are multiple views on history and not all narratives are the same, to make them appreciate other people, cultures and religions, while having a good grounding on the own group identity. The group identity is not steel bound, it has to be flexible otherwise what you will be producing would be drones. Not good! Textbooks should inspire, not go about propagating hate or wrongful information or force "group-think" on the poor little mites. But then, that is what happens when you leave education solely up to the government and ignore the parent’s contribution. To end with a ferociously bad groaner, "the primary responsibility for a child’s Education is ap-parent".