This chapter told me that even in the making of textbooks,
money comes first, which greatly relates to what Rab said on Friday about how
Japanese schools prioritize money over the quality of education. It also
relates to Sicko because in Sicko, the less wealthy American citizens are deprived
of health insurance due to their low income. It is upsetting to me that words such
as “commercial” and “market” are associated with education because education is
something that everyone has the right to and is free, according to the
Declaration of Human Rights. The tendency of private schools to offer more
unique and stimulating classes than public schools is definitely a
discrimination against less wealthy people. In a nation that greatly supports
the Declaration of Human Rights, the capitalistic rule of education seems
contradictory. Although not every American textbook authors and publishers are
like this, I wish that those who are were kind enough to consider students’ and
the nation’s future before their own wealth. I feel that the authors’ names on
the front cover of the textbooks are merely labels that increase the sale of
textbooks, just like the label on a juice pack saying “made with real fruit
juice” when it probably is not.
The similarity between the texts of “Pathways to the
Present” and “A History of United States” presented in this chapter was
completely absurd. As Loewen mentioned many times throughout the book, authors
do not actually write the textbooks; freelance writers are employed to do that
job. This sounds like plagiarism to me. However, they do not receive as much
criticism as secondary works which is why they can get away with this so easily.
One thing I don’t understand is why textbooks are not part of secondary works.
They are books written by historians who use primary and other sources to recount
historical happenings etc. I think high schools should use secondary works
instead of textbooks to teach history because secondary works are actually written by historians and have
arguments in them while textbooks are more like encyclopedias which cover broad
subject matters but each subject is superficial. For example, if the students
were to learn about WWII, teachers could extract excerpts from various
secondary works and present those to the class as study materials instead the
boring, lengthy textbooks. This way, students have the chance to practise
critical thinking by confronting the diverse opinions in each secondary works.
Loewen seemed to imply in this chapter that the publisher
and editor side chooses the authors of the textbooks instead of authors
choosing to write their own textbook. This seems strange to me because I think
it would be hard for two historians, who are not familiar with each other, to
produce a work together. Obviously, each historian’s assumptions and views on
certain historical events greatly differ as history itself can be very
controversial. Unless they are research partners, it is unlikely that their
opinions on what to place in textbooks and what not to will always match, and
if two historians with completely different views work on a textbook together,
the result is one inconsistent work.
In this chapter, Loewen quotes a president of a major
publishing company who says, “textbooks mirror our society and contain what the
society considers acceptable”. It is frightening to think that what the society
considers acceptable is to completely ignore Woodrow Wilson’s discrimination
against the African Americans or Helen Keller’s life as a socialist or the
mistreatment of the Natives by Columbus or the damage U.S. caused in Vietnam. This
is just going to lead to more future conflicts between the U.S. and other nations
since it encourages students not to accept its country’s faults. Well actually,
how are they supposed to know about it in the first place if textbooks conceal
them from students? However, U.S. being a capitalistic country, I think it is
unlikely that the current system of how textbooks are made is going to change…
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