A textbook example of disputed facts

Do you know what your children are reading tonight?

We're not talking about dirty lyrics or comics. We're talkingtextbooks. We're talking historical information. Facts.

The special-interest groups will cheat your children if youdon't watch out.

Some of the more ambitious publishers have gotten the word thatit's time to put religion back in the texts - religion, not faith,the history of different religions. They're also trying to expandand deepen historical content.

Critics of proposed new textbooks for children in kindergartenthrough the eighth grade in California, a leader of public-schoolreform, created a new tower of Babel with their angry criticism, aspontaneous theater of the absurd.

Atheists complained that their point of view was excluded. Theywant religion treated as superstition. California Moslems want toerase references to any historical account of religious persecutionof "infidels."

Homosexuals, a new lobby in the world of textbooks, want tocelebrate the imagined homosexuality of an eclectic group ofhistorical figures, including Julius Caesar, Erasmus, Michelangelo,Alexander Hamilton, Willa Cather and even Eleanor Roosevelt.

Gilbert T. Sewall, the scholarly editor of Social StudiesReview, who evaluates textbooks and who attended the Californiahearings, doesn't find gratuitous attacks on the new textbooks, whichare considerably richer and more informative than the old ones, alaughing matter.

"The many wonderful advances in these recommended textbooks wentunmentioned," he says. "Institutional prejudice, conspiratorialomission and victimization were the watchwords of the day."

Some of the more obvious "slights" raised by certain Jews,Christians and Moslems will probably be corrected. Mr. Sewall isalso concerned about the increasing pressure of "Afro-centrists."Unlike historians who have invited debate on their conclusions, hesays, some Afro-centrists offer "half-baked facts, speciousscholarship, overblown contentions and take this to be deliveredtruth."

The melting-pot ideal, so long venerated in our nation ofimmigrants, is being pushed aside by "Afro-centrism." Said oneAfro-centrist to the New Republic: Multicultural means "mentalgenocide."

One California textbook hearing became so violent that policehad to be called to restore an intellectual atmosphere. "Pressurefrom the right was considerable 10 years ago," says Mr. Sewall, "butin social studies the right is overshadowed now by pressures from theleft."

Irene Trivas, an artist for children's readers, told the NewYork Times how she had to quit the textbook business when herpublishers tried to "be everything to everybody." One publisher sent10 pages of instructions on how to draw the fictional characters:"The hero was a Hispanic boy. There were black twins, one boy, onegirl; an overweight Oriental boy, and an American Indian girl. Thatleaves the Caucasian. Since we mustn't forget the physicallyhandicapped, (the white girl) was born with a congenitalmalformation."

A salad a mom and dad were making together (presumably in a bowllarge enough to accommodate four hands) could not include iceberglettuce, but "something nice" and upscale like endive.

Well, why not? Isn't lettuce entitled to a proper role model?