Censorship: evidence of bias in our children's textbooks.

Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children's Textbooks

AN AMERICAN social-studies text incurrent use devotes thirty pages to the Pilgrims, in which the observation of the first Thanksgiving is described. However, the book includes not one word or image identifying religion as the mainspring of Puritan New England, thereby making possible the confusion of the student who returned home to explain to his mother that "Thanksgiving was when the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.' The woman called the principal of the school (located in a suburb of New York City) and reminded him that Thanksgiving is the occasion chosen by the Pilgrims for thanking God. He replied that "that was her opinion,' and schools must confine themselves to teaching what is in the books.

In 1983, Paul C. Vitz, a professorof psychology at New York University, systematically examined ninety widely used elementary-school socialstudies and high-school history texts, together with an assortment of elementary-school readers, with the intention of discovering to what degree --if any--they exhibited bias and censorship. He concluded the technical report in 1985 and proceeded to develop it into a book, recently published as Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children's Textbooks (Servant Books, P. O. Box 8617, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48107; $6.95). I read it in a couple of hours on the afternoon of December 25, the day some Americans, Mexicans, Italians, and Others give thanks to the ancient Hebrews for inventing the Happy Holidays.

"Are public-school textbooks biased:Are they censored? The answer to both is yes.' Exempli gratia: a) Of the texts introducing children in grades one through four to American social life past and present, "None of the books . . . contain one word referring to any religious activity in American life. . . . Not one word refers to any child or adult who prayed, or who went to church or temple. . . . The few pictures--all told there were only 11--that do refer to religious activity were distributed over sixty books and roughly 15,000 pages. . . . not one word or image shows any form of contemporary representative Protestantism.' b) "In a very general way the family is often mentioned in the textbooks, but the idea that marriage is the origin and foundation of the family is never presented. . . . Nowhere is it suggested that being a mother or homemaker was a worthy and important role for a woman.' c) "The fifthgrade U.S. history texts include modest coverage of religion in colonial America and in the early Southwest missions; however, the treatment of the past one hundred or two hundred years is so devoid of reference to religion as to give the impression that it has almost ceased to exist in America.' d) "The sixth-grade books deal with world history or world culture, and they neglect, often to the point of serious distortion, Jewish and Christian historical contributions.' (In a number of texts, the life of Mohammed gets much more coverage than the life of Jesus.) e) In books offering a selection of "role models' for their readers, "Not one contemporary role model is conservative and male, and no person from business since World War II was selected.' f) Of a total of 670 stories and articles anthologized in readers from the third- through the sixth-grade levels, "A very few . . . have religion as a secondary theme, but no story features Christian or Jewish religious motivation, although one story does make American Indian religion the central theme in the life of an American white girl.' There are no Horatio Alger characters in these stories, no immigrants making it, "almost no' stories showing marriage or motherhood as important or positive things--but plenty of tomboys beating the tomsawyers at their own games.

Perhaps the most striking aspect,therefore, of these texts is the air of profound unreality that pervades them. Human reality, for the authors and publishers of these works, exists only in the past: a past in which Man was made of God and worshipped Him in regular congregation according to revelatory Gospel; in which men were men and women women and everyone grateful for the fact; in which there were more aspiring John Jacob Astors than Robert F. Kennedys. Of course, the new breed of educator does not call it reality: He calls it a past cramfull of reaction, superstitution, and error, approachable only by virtue of the impassable gulf of centuries, which reduces all its evils to a roster of quaintnesses rendered impotent by Time. As for such unfortunate relics of the Bad Old Past as Protestant Fundamentalism, don't mention them: The printed word has mysterious powers of reincarnation. Just keep mum, and the little Hopes of the Future won't even notice what is going on under their noses.

Vitz is too sophisticated to fall forthe conspiracy theory: Since the days of John Dewey, that's just the way the American educational establishment has been. It is contemptible, completely hopeless. The only answer is for America to learn from the accomplishments of the other Western democracies, which, led by the Dutch, have long since permitted private schools, mainly of a religious nature, to co-exist with the public institutions of learning, share and share alike from the national till.