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Educating Hassan and Amal
Over the
summer a committee of United Nations officials and Iraqi educators
scrambled to prepare de-Baathicized, Saddam-free textbooks for
Iraqi schoolchildren, who began classes on Oct. 5.
The group examined 560 textbooks
and recommended changes in every one. While having nothing new
in substance, the new textbooks will simply have blank spaces
where the committee cut out pictures of Hussein and other Baathist
material.
But the books won't be available
until November, so Iraqi students and teachers began the school
year by going through the old books and ripping out Hussein's
pictures and pronouncements, some of which were mixed in with
the laws of nature in science textbooks.
Hussein was ubiquitous in Iraq.
Statues of the tyrant littered Baghdad's public squares, murals
depicting his heroism blotched the sides of buildings, and in
schools, teachers were forced to include Baathist party doctrine
and paeans to their leader, one way or another, in every subject.
Iraqi first graders learned to
read with passages like this:
"My tank is big. Its firepower
is great. With it I protect my borders and the homeland of my
ancestors. My cannon is heavy. There is nothing like it. Its
shot roars. My enemy will fear it."
The grade school equivalents of
Dick and Jane were Hassan and Amal. But instead of running after
Spot or throwing a red ball, they held portraits of Hussein
and said things like, "Come Hassan, let us chant for the
homeland and use our pens to write, 'Our beloved Saddam.'"
Hassan would reply, "I came,
Amal. I came in a hurry to chant, 'Oh Saddam, our courageous
president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you,
carrying weapons and marching to success.'"
The regime distorted history and
English texts most of all. Children studied maps of an Arab
homeland stretching across northern Africa and through the Middle
East to the borders of Turkey and Iran, with no trace of Israel.
Many writing exercises were centered on the coup of July 1968,
when Hussein's Baath party came into power, and instructed students
to write about improvements in the military and economy.
From an early age all Iraqi students
were told how much their leader had done for them. In first
grade textbooks they read: "I love the president, the leader,
Saddam Hussein. We love him, and he loves us. The president
visits us at school and visits us at home. We are all soldiers
for the leader, Saddam Hussein. God protect our leader."
This is both funny and disturbing.
It is funny because it is absurd; it is disturbing because it
is a distortion of reality so intentional that it defeats the
entire purpose of education.
Propaganda and political indoctrination
have no place in public schools because they chain the intellect
and imprison the mind-the opposite of what education is supposed
to do. We don't call this sort of thing education at all. We
call it brainwashing.
Yet in American textbooks and
educational materials we find different manifestations of the
same error.
Although our texts do not have
front cover full-page pictures of George W. Bush with a message
saying, "This book between your hands is the gift of the
Revolution to you," our textbooks are, perhaps, the gift
of another revolution, social and cultural, which has profoundly
affected public education and has quietly infiltrated the textbook
industry.
A recent book by Diane Ravitch,
The Language Police, reveals an "elaborate, well-established
protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly
implemented by textbook publishers, testing agencies, professional
associations, states, and the federal government."
Ravitch explains how major textbook
publishers hire "bias and sensitivity reviewers" to
censor language they deem offensive in textbooks and test materials.
The idea, apparently, is to protect
American schoolchildren from anything upsetting, unfamiliar,
unseemly or politically incorrect as they study history and
literature and other subjects.
Ravitch includes some enlightening
appendices that list "bias and sensitivity" prohibitions
collected from various publishers and state agencies. Some images
to avoid on tests include: boys playing sports; a mother comforting
children; men as capable leaders; girls wearing dresses; fathers
taking children on adventurous outings; and women consistently
portrayed as wives and mothers.
Words to avoid in texts include:
able-bodied (banned as offensive, replace with person who is
non-disabled), Adam and Eve (replace with Eve and Adam to demonstrate
that males do not take priority over females) and hundreds more.
Texts are not to use the phrase "girls can't," or
"women shouldn't," Stories set in coastal areas or
mountains are to be avoided because of "regional bias"-the
notion that children cannot relate to anything outside their
own experience.
This sort of blatant, ultra-politically
correct censorship is both funny and disturbing for the same
reason that Saddam-era Iraqi textbooks are: They distort, undermine,
and replace the project of public education with a program of
political indoctrination, propaganda, social engineering and
brainwashing. Schoolchildren, whether Iraqi or American, deserve
better.
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Editorial
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