Texas has had its share of textbook controversies. Last spring, the state board of education approved a set of resolutions emphasizing the superiority of the U.S. and its Judeo-Christian, democratic principles. In recent years, perhaps the biggest debate has been over whether and how to include creationism and evolution in science textbooks. As one of the largest consumers of educational textbooks in the country, the resolutions of the Texas board are influential, even though they’re not legally binding.
Now the board is at it again. Last week, they passed a resolution encouraging history textbook publishers to be nicer to Christianity, and not as nice to Islam. Seriously.
Some choice selections of the official resolution, approved just this past Friday:
WHEREAS pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias has tainted some past Texas Social Studies textbooks….
WHEREAS pro-Islamic/anti-Christian half-truths, selective disinformation, and false editorial stereotypes still roil some Social Studies textbooks nationwide…
WHEREAS more such discriminatory treatment of religion may occur as Middle Easterners buy into the U.S. public textbook oligopoly…
RESOLVED by the SBOE, that diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross pro-Islamic/anti-Christian distortions in Social Studies texts….
What’s the proof does the board have for this anti-Christian bias supposedly so rampant and threatening in the textbook publishing industry? For one, members of the board went through just two social studies texts and compared the exact number of lines devoted to each religion, and pointed out differences in discussion of Christian and Muslim massacres. To wit:
“…[in one instance] allotting 82 student text lines to Christian beliefs, practices and holy writings but 159 (almost twice as many) to those of Islam; describing Crusaders’ massacres of European Jews yet ignoring the Muslim Tamcriane’s massacre of perhaps 90,000 co-religionists at Baghdad in 1401, and of perhaps 100,000 Indian POWs at Delhi in 1398…”
I guess we’re back to tallying up who was worse back in the middle ages, because keeping score angrily is a truly fruitful exercise, no?
There’s also a thoughtful line accusing a textbook of “thrice charging medieval Christians with sexism; and saying the Church ‘laid the foundations for anti-Semitism’”…but that couldn’t possibly be true, right?
Never mind that the two textbooks the board used as evidence aren’t even used in Texas schools anymore. Never mind that many foreign companies (of many religious affiliations, or none at all) have stakes in many American businesses. Never mind that no other religions besides Islam and Christianity are mentioned in the analysis of the textbooks (after all, by the board’s logic, shouldn’t all religions get equal coverage?).
If it weren’t so disturbing, it would almost be funny.
See full text of the Texas board’s resolution here [PDF].
