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California seventh-graders being proselytized by the state's public
schools on behalf of Islam? Yes, says Jennifer Schroeder, mother
of a San Luis Obispo seventh-grader, who has filed an official complaint
with local school authorities over Across the Centuries,
the social-studies textbook used in all the state's seventh-grade
public classrooms.
"Our contention
here is not that they're teaching students about Islam, which is
constitutional as long as it's done in a non-biased manner. It's
that they have a real bias towards Islam," says Brad Dacus,
Schroeder's attorney and president of the Pacific
Justice Institute.
Dacus is helping
angry parents throughout the state file similar complaints with
local school authorities. Their case got a big boost on Monday from
noted Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, whose New York Post
column
attacked the 558-page history textbook as an example of "the
privileging of Islam in the United States."
"Everything
Islamic is praised; every problem with Islam is swept under the
rug," Pipes writes. He further complains that the textbook
presents a rosier picture of Islam than facts warrant, that it promotes
Islamic doctrines as objective fact, and instructs students to engage
in homework assignments in which they pretend to be Muslims.
But Across
the Centuries publisher Houghton Mifflin counters that Pipes
only has half the story. California's state-devised history-curriculum
proceeds chronologically. Collin Earnst, a spokesman for the publisher,
says that Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism are covered in the
sixth-grade text, as mandates by state standards.
"The state
of California decided what would be taught and when it would be
taught," says Earnst. "If you look at both these books
as a unit, they're fair representations of all these religions,
and present them in a similar fashion."
That is not
the view of one award-winning seventh-grade history teacher from
the Bay Area, who asked NRO to withhold her name, fearing reprisal.
The teacher explained that in California schools, the role of Christianity
in world civilization is studied primarily in grades seven and 10.
"At no
point in either grade is the role of Christianity as cogently, thoroughly
or engagingly described in the state history texts as Islam,"
she says.
"Seventh-grade
social studies covers 1,500 years of world history in nine months,"
the teacher continues. "Teaching this curriculum is a delicate
balancing act because this is the only time in 12 years that most
California students study these civilizations. Islam is important
in world history, and should be presented accurately and engagingly.
That does not justify the virtual obliteration of the history of
Christianity and Europe in the state [seventh-grade] text."
That's putting
it perhaps too strongly, but it is hard to understand why, in an
American textbook in which the birth and expansion of Islam gets
55 pages, the Middle Ages in Europe get merely seven, and the Byzantine
Empire six. By way of contrast, the story of the Umayyad Muslims
is told in seven pages, and even more peculiarly for students in
a Western culture, a chapter about "Village Society in West
Africa" takes up eight pages.
To be fair,
Across the Centuries does have a lot of ground to cover to
be faithful to California's standards. Funny, though, how the textbook
leaves out or greatly downplays state-mandated topics having to
do with Christianity.
According to
state teaching guidelines,
the birth of Christianity is to be taught as the final topic in
the sixth-grade school year, in a unit called "East Meets West:
Rome." Yet attorney Brad Dacus says his client claims her son
was told the reason Christianity wasn't taught in his San Luis Obispo
history class was "they ran out of time."
The transmission
of the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire, decrees the
state, is to be taught in the "Fall of Rome" unit. But
Across the Centuries makes no mention of Christianity here,
not even when it discusses the Emperor Constantine, whose battlefield
conversion to the Christian faith was one of the pivotal events
of Western civilization.
State guidelines
call for Christianity to be addressed again in a unit on medieval
Europe: "Special attention should be paid to Christianity in
the Middle Ages because the Church, more powerful than any feudal
state, influenced every aspect of life in medieval Europe. The story
of St. Francis of Assisi should be told, both for his embodiment
of the Christian ideal and for the accessibility to students of
his gentle beliefs."
But in the
seven pages devoted to the European Middle Ages, Christianity is
presented not in terms of moral and theological belief, but almost
entirely as a matter of power relations and social organization.
How much space does Across the Centuries give to St. Francis
of Assisi, a historical figure so important he merited special mention
in the state guidelines? Ten sentences, plus three lines from one
of his poems.
This bias against
the religious content of Christianity extends into the unit on the
Reformation, which gives short shrift to the theological ideas that
inspired Protestantism, and focuses almost exclusively on the social
and political fallout.
Critics of
the textbook complain not only about what they consider its shortchanging
of Christianity, but also about its uncritical assessment of Islamic
history.
"The book
talks about how Islam gave women rights, but nowhere does it teach
that the Koran says a man is allowed to have seven wives. Kids should
know that, because it's relevant to the religion and the culture,"
Dacus says. "They want to make Islam palatable to Americans."
And, Pipes
and Dacus claim wording in the Islam chapters presents theological
beliefs as historical facts.
This isn't
entirely true. There are numerous passages that contain language
like "Muhammad is believed by his followers to have...."
But others are more ambiguous ("Muhammad was awakened one night
by a thunderous voice [of God] that seemed to come from everywhere..."),
and still others do in fact present theological belief as fact ("[T]he
very first word the angel Gabriel spoke to Muhammad was 'Recite.'").
Even if Christianity
and Judaism are presented in the sixth-grade text in a like manner,
says Pipes, that hardly solves the problem.
"That
would mean that a social science textbook series was looking at
every religion from within," Pipes tells NRO. "That's
pretty dubious. Here it's just plain boosterism."
If the Islamic
chapters seem like they could have been written by a Muslim activist
group, that's no accident. The California-based Council
on Islamic Education, founded in 1988 to fight what the group
believes is anti-Muslim bias in the classroom, works closely with
textbook publishers to review and develop teaching material. The
CIE, which didn't return a message left on its answering machine,
participated in the writing and editing of Across the Centuries.
"They're
very professional, very informed and they have at their heart the
same thing we do, which is the desire for good, accurate information
for the children," Abigail Jungreis, who oversees Houghton
Mifflin's social-studies textbook division, told a Muslim web publication
in a 1999 interview.
"We see
our reviewers as playing a crucial role in enabling us to present
accurate and complete information," Jungreis continued. "In
this day and age, there's no way anybody can be an expert on all
aspects of history or social studies subjects."
Jungreis did
not respond to NRO's request for an interview. Instead, Houghton
Mifflin spokesman Earnst replied, saying that members of other faiths
were also consulted to review textbooks for fairness and balance.
The Bay Area
social-studies teacher credits activism on the part of California
Muslims for the way Islam is presented in the textbook. "The
local Muslim community makes it a point to attend social-studies
teachers' conventions to share teaching aids, and they also offer
free guest speakers for the classroom."
The veteran
educator says she sees these efforts paying off by the way her students,
all non-Muslims, react to the Islamic faith in the classroom.
"They're
generally very enthused by Islam," she says. "The prose
[in "Across the Centuries"] is boring and disjointed in
the sections about Western culture, but the book does a great job
with Islam. And the Saudis have contributed well-written, lavishly
illustrated free materials that are popular with students."
The Pacific
Justice Institute's Dacus is not surprised to hear that kids come
away from Across the Centuries thinking uncritically about
Islam. Says Dacus: "That textbook would be a great recruitment
tool for Islam for children, if that was the point of a 7th-grade
education."
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