Clash of the Textbooks

Over the past few years, there have been many conflicts over the content of history textbooks, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Northern Ireland, Russia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.  Most confrontations concerned the question of how much of a nation's sordid past, in comparison with its glorious accomplishments, should be included for study.  In an effort to enhance youths' sense of national pride, should Russian texts avoid mentioning the vicious treatment of minorities in Stalin's era?  Should Japanese texts gloss over atrocities committed by soldiers in China and Korea?  Should German texts downplay the Holocaust of Hitler's day?  Should France's curricula ignore the French army's repressive tactics in North Africa during colonial times?

Critics complained of religious bias in Jordanian and Pakistani public-school textbooks. Although Jordanian texts generally advocated tolerance toward other religions, debate continued over the support for jihad, the Islamic principle of waging holy war against non-Muslims. Pakistan's government-sanctioned textbooks for state schools were censured by foreign observers for including such passages as "Islam preaches equality, brotherhood, and fraternity [whereas] the foundation of Hindu [society] is injustice and cruelty."

Attempts to renovate education in Iraq's 16,000 schools resulted in both success and failure. The U.S. Agency for International Development reported that it had built or refurbished 2,405 schools. Although textbooks were rewritten to expunge references to Saddam Hussein's fallen regime, the revised versions still included passages urging Iraqis to fight "against invasion and foreign powers." The production of new civics books that promoted democracy was stalled by inaction in the highly centralized Ministry of Education, and the safety of students was threatened by street violence that caused many to avoid attending class.

Following terrorist bombings in London, the British government rejected demands that the nation's five state-funded Muslim schools be closed. Instead, officials intended to increase the number of such schools to 150 in an effort to move thousands of Muslim children from independent Islamic schools into government-controlled mainstream education. Muslim schools would be offered the same voluntary-aided status held by almost 7,000 Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Jewish schools. Complaints that Muslim schools in the U.K. failed to teach tolerance of other faiths led the British Office of Standards in Education to inspect 50 Muslim schools and 40 evangelical Christian schools. Investigators discovered that a higher proportion of evangelical schools (43%) than Muslim schools (36%) were guilty of intolerance.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast area in late August, thousands of American refugee students from the disaster area were enrolled in schools across the nation. Storm damage had left more than 135,000 children in Louisiana and 35,000 in Mississippi without a nearby school to attend.

A South African research centre reported that while sub-Sahara African countries were moving slowly toward universal schooling, more than half of the region's 80 million children of primary-school age were still not in school. Enrollment in secondary schools in 22 countries was below 20%, while less than 10% of the workforce had a secondary-school education. In an effort to reduce the AIDS epidemic in Uganda, MP Sulaiman Madada offered to pay the university fees for girls who were virgins when they graduated from high school.

French students organized massive street demonstrations to protest changes that Minister of Education François Fillon proposed for the traditional baccalaureate test ("le bac"), which for two centuries had been high-school graduates' passport to a university education. Faced with such furor, Fillon withdrew his proposal so that 634,168 high-school seniors in France and its overseas territories could sit for the exam, which annually confronted students with the analysis of complex philosophical issues; "le bac" dated back to Napoleon's time.

Education officials in Finland credited the quality of the nation's teachers when Finnish 15-year-olds scored at the top in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) testing plan that compared educational achievement across 41 industrialized countries. The generally poor showing on PISA exams by students in Germany (ranked 25 out of the 41 countries) prompted the German government to extend the length of the school day and offer improved and expanded German-language instruction for immigrant children.