It ain’t necessarily so: The textbooks children learn from in school reveal and shape national attitudes and provoke debate
Textbooks Round the World: It Ain’t Necessarily So
PARISIANS are in a tizz about capitalism. New Yorkers get stressed about sex. In Seoul and San Antonio, Texas, 11,000km apart, citizens fret about the relationship between humans and apes. What goes into school textbooks—and, even more, what is left out—spurs concern and controversy all over the world.
And so it should. Few, if any, instruments shape national culture more powerfully than the materials used in schools. Textbooks are not only among the first books most people encounter; in many places they are, along with religious texts, almost the only books they encounter. A study in South Africa showed that fewer than half of pupils had access to more than ten books at home. In 2010 a study by Egypt’s government found that, apart from school textbooks, 88% of Egyptian households read no books.
The degree to which a government keeps control of the textbooks used in classrooms is a good, if imprecise, guide to its commitment to ideological control. Where that yearning is strong, governments are likely to produce the texts themselves or define minutely what goes into them. But even when governments are less directly involved, ideology can count—either the ideology of the groups that control textbook-writing, or of those that seek, through school boards and the like, to constrain them. Such manoeuvres can short-circuit the healthy debate that societies should encourage over how the world is taught to children, screening out views that offend or challenge those who wield the blue pencils of power.
Watching the Wahhabis
America’s State Department employs people to keep an eye on other countries’ textbooks, in an effort to understand better how their people think and what their governments want them to think. Other countries probably do the same. So too, in its own way, does the Georg Eckert Institute, a centre for textbook research in the small German town of Braunschweig. It is a measure of how sensitive the subject can be that even this independent institution must struggle to get copies of textbooks from many places. Nonetheless, it has gathered samples from 160 countries. Simone Lässig, the institute’s director, says the most contentious are books covering history and geography, especially when they include maps, though religion is a growing area of dispute.
Other people’s textbooks have long been a source of worry. After the first world war, the League of Nations sought to make them less nationalistic. Anxieties increased, though, after the attacks on America on September 11th 2001, when some in both America and Saudi Arabia, including officials, supposed that Saudi Arabia’s curriculum of intolerance was responsible, at least in part, for the emergence of al-Qaeda’s brutal brand of jihad. Buffeted by the criticism, Saudi rulers promised reform. From King Abdullah down, Saudis have insisted repeatedly that the intolerant bits of their teaching materials have been removed. But in a stubbornly autocratic country that adheres to a puritanical Wahhabism, there is a lot of intolerance to go round.