Mohenjodaro,
now in Pakistan.
|
Japan:
ambiguous textbooks
The committee
charged with revising history textbooks meets in Tokyo’s unsightly Mombusho building,
which houses Japan’s Education Ministry. Experts usually update textbooks every two
years to incorporate new information–archaeological discoveries and decisive revelations–or
make changes required by a modified curriculum. This year, the routine task provoked
an international controversy.
The committee revised and approved nine high school history textbooks. All of them
had to be corrected. One, published by Fusosha, which belongs to the conservative
Fuji-Sankei press group, underwent over 200 modifications.
Despite the requested corrections, the Fusosha textbook, written by a group of nationalistic
professors, continues to ignore the tragic plight of “comfort women,” the Imperial
army’s former sex slaves, most of whom were Korean. And it asserts that there is
“no proof” the Japanese slaughtered 300,000 people during a massacre in Nanjing,
China, in 1937.
The eight other books are less questionable but just as ambiguous. All of them say
that, despite its horrors, the Pacific war ended Western colonialism in Asia. For
now, Japanese students grow up with a truncated vision of history. Nonetheless, the
overwhelming majority of public school teachers has rejected Fusosha’s book, and
none of Japan’s prefectures (each one chooses which books to include in the curriculum)
has opted for it.
But what can be done about revisionist mangas (comic books), which are breaking sales
records? The illustrator and polemicist Yoshinori Kobayashi has sold several million
copies of Senso Ron (“About the War”), a picture book that glorifies the heroes of
World War II. An organization of revisionist teachers, Tsukuru Kai, has asked him
to illustrate their future works.
More alarming, polls show that Japanese teenagers, who have been disoriented by the
current economic crisis, say they “enjoy” books boasting about the code of honour
and the Japanese virtues of order and discipline, without mentioning the atrocities
that were committed.
Casting his eye over these various trends, Dr. Aruki Wada, a professor at Tokyo University,
says that “Japan still hasn’t cleaned up its past.”
Richard
Werly, Tokyo-based journalist
|
|
Over
the past decade, profound historical changes have led many countries to revise how
they teach history in school. Falk Pingel* looks at the pitfalls of the exercise
To
what extent do authors who revise school textbooks tread the fine line between historical
truth and distortion for political or other purposes?
Careful analysis is required to ensure that biases do not creep into texts, and there
are several criteria for judging accuracy. The bottom line is that different perspectives
must be mentioned, otherwise you’re likely to get a biased presentation of history.
This tends to be the case with how religious issues are treated, or how the so-called
underdeveloped countries are presented. This can be very different from how the people
concerned actually view their own culture or religion. We have found biased interpretations
of the two World Wars in European textbooks, when they dealt with borders, problems
with minorities or victims of persecution, for example.
What guidelines exist for avoiding bias?
The Institute for International Textbook Research, with Unesco, has developed
guidelines for textbook revision. There are methods on how to do a linguistic analysis
of a text to gauge whether it is biased. The deeper structure of a text is analyzed
to assess whether cultural diversity is respected, or whether there are racial and
ethnic stereotypes.
What about the choice of authors?
The way textbooks are written varies across different regions. In Western Europe
or the U.S., a team of three or more scholars is involved in writing a single text.
An open textbook market exists so that schools have a choice. This in itself is usually
a guarantee that different views are expressed. But in other regions (including some
countries of East and Southeast Europe, as well as many African and Asian countries),
textbooks are often written by a single author who is commissioned by the state to
write according to a narrow set of guidelines.
Is this problem more acute in certain regions?
Yes, in former Soviet countries, but there has been a change for the better in
the last decade. We’ve organized seminars with textbook authors from Eastern Europe
to teach them new methods of writing and discussing the different interpretations
possible in history. This is particularly difficult when we are dealing with the
Balkan wars or with the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia, where memories of suffering
are still fresh.
What do you see as the most serious bias in history textbooks?
The tendency to construct a continuity in time, whether of one culture, one nation
and even of nation states, investing this culture, people or nation with a dignity
superior to others. Some European countries, for example, say their nations were
born in the 9th or 10th century, when the nation state has only existed for 200 years.
How can this be prevented?
Sometimes discussions are useful to deconstruct this notion of continuity over
centuries. Of course, most nations trace back roots to ancient or medieval times,
when social or religious patterns of dependency were much more important than ethnic
or “national” groupings. The term “people” or “nation” did not have the same meaning
as today. Often, textbook authors tend to put their own people or nation in the centre
and diminish or exclude others believed to have less “historical” rights. Our message
is: don’t dehumanize what is different from you.
Germany over the last 20 years has developed an excellent resource for teachers
on the Nazi period. Do textbooks get more accurate with the passage of time?
Yes, time does help. It is much harder to have accurate textbooks for countries still
at war. The latest Palestinian texts developed by the Palestinian National Authority
don’t deal with the present dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all.
In contrast, Israel has an open private textbook market. Different versions are now
available, but none that acknowledge Palestinian culture or history.
|
K.N.Panikkar*:
recasting the past in india
Since coming
to power three years ago, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has actively
sought to impose a new history curriculum. This attempt has nothing to do with new
trends or methodology within the discipline. By restructuring educational institutions,
rewriting curricula and textbooks, and making major personnel changes, the government
is attempting to recast the past by giving it a strongly Hindu religious orientation.
The right-wing party now controls the Ministry of Human Resource Development (which
includes Education) and the National Council for Educational Research and Training
(NCERT) which produces most school texts. These, along with other public institutions
like the Indian Council for Historical Research, are rapidly losing their academic
freedom, as renowned historians are replaced by bureaucrats and academics willing
to toe the political line.
The current rewriting of Indian history is part of a larger long-term political plan
aimed at reordering the secular character that has informed the educational and cultural
policies of the country since its independence. The BJP seeks to redefine the character
of the nation as Hindu, and to lend legitimacy to the politics of cultural nationalism.
To inculcate a sense of national pride, Indian history is seen through stereotypes
rooted in religious identity. No aspect of history has been spared, be it social
tensions, political battles or cultural differences. The achievements of ancient
Indian civilization are identified only with Hinduism and are grossly exaggerated.
The BJP would have us believe that humankind and all scientific discovery, from bronze-casting
to printing and aeronautics, originated in northern India, the original home of the
Aryans.
The period of the Rig Veda (a religious treatise) has been pushed back to 5000 B.C.
against the general scholarly consensus of 1500 B.C. in order to associate the Aryans
with the Indus Valley civilization which flourished in Harappa and Mohenjodaro, now
in Pakistan.
These distortions are not limited to the past. The more recent history of the national
movement has been altered to glorify leaders of staunch Hindu organizations, even
if they were collaborators of colonial rule.
The Hindu view attempts to exclude all those who migrated to India and their descendants
as foreigners or the enemy. In reality, India’s demography reflects the coming together
of a variety of groups–racial, linguistic and ethnic–during the course of the last
two millennia and raises the question of who the “outsider” really is.
Fortunately, there is a strong resistance from academics and historians against this
trend. They are doing all they can to fight the gradual introduction of new textbooks
and to uphold the country’s long tradition of “scientific” history.
Ed. note: The government has defended its recently introduced National Curricular
Framework for School Education which suggests that textbooks be revised. Denying
that “any religious bias” had been introduced into history textbooks, the Human Resources
Development minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, insisted that his government was “merely
following the changes recommended by the NCERT...We have prepared the frame in the
most democratic manner,” he said.
* Former
professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. One of several eminent historians
whose two-volume treatise on Modern Indian history, “Towards Freedom”, was summarily
withdrawn by the Indian Council of Historical Research.
|
|
