No, I am not ranting about problems with my computer equipment again. I am talking about another story in which people seem to be going overboard with 'political correctness." I found this story while reading Jen Speaks, who has the real skinny on whether the USS Lincoln or the USS Kitty Hawk had spent the longest time at sea since the Viet Nam war. I am not going to spill her scoop by giving the details, so visit her blog.
It seems that California is going to extremes to make its new textbooks politically correct, removing all references to the "Founding Fathers," "Mount Rushmore," and "snowmen," while additionally banning any depictions of Indigenous Americans wearing braids and in rural setting or foods such as hot dogs, soft drinks, butter or sweets because they are not good nutritional items.
I think our textbooks should, to our greatest capacity, be free of any type of stereotyping," said Sue Stickel, deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the California Department of Education. "We need to make sure that all ethnicities are represented. We need to make sure that both males and females are represented. We need to make sure that our materials cover the full gamut." [emphasis supplied]
What we need to make sure of is that we tell the truth in our textbooks. I am all for making the whole story available. If the person who invented the widget or discovered potash in the hills of a western territory was a purple one-legged Lithuanian hermaphrodite,* then by all means, do not pretend that he, she, it was a WASP. But do not slant the textbooks in the name of political correctness so that children are left with a false impression of history or of society. Men once were in power, women had to struggle to own property, vote and have political power. African-Americans were enslaved, and although a war was fought to free them, they remained second-class citizens for more than a century afterward. Indigenous Americans were persecuted, slaughtered, imprisoned and subjugated. Chinese immigrants were denied basic rights of citizenship until well into the last century. Mexican-Americans were struggling to gain recognition of the prejudice they faced in the 1960's. It is fact, and glossing it over in an attempt to make it "politically correct," does not change the facts. Sure, there are terms that should be avoided in our textbooks, racial and ethnic epithets that should be buried, but our history is our history, life is life and kids have to deal with it. If you hide all the pictures of hot dogs, how is a kid to know what one is or whether it is nutritious or not if he has no idea of what it is when he first encounters one. You know, maybe home schooling is not that bad of an idea after all, because if this story is any indication of what kind of kooks we have running the public schools, I am not too sure we ought to be sending our kids there.
*Obligatory "Political Correctness" CAVEAT: Nothing herein was intended as offensive, and if you are purple, one-legged, Lithuanian, or a hermaphrodite or any combination of such traits, believe that no offense was intended. Such terms were placed solely to illustrate a point and were not intended to be derisive.
Posted by Tiger at May 2, 2003 02:37 PM | TrackBack