California’s Book Ban
State Senator Leland Yee, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, wants to bar California from adopting any new material from curriculum changes in Texas, which he and other critics view as right-wing revisionism. Though much publicized, the charge fails to stand up, but some textbooks do need correction. Those would be California textbooks, and this is not a new problem.
“They’re all horrors, and there is no reason for them.” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that in 1988 about California’s watered-down texts. Honig, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, duly invited scholar Diane Ravitch to revise California’s history curriculum, which had been tasked to instill pride in accredited victim groups.
“Telling publishers that their books must instill pride only guarantees a phony version of feel-good history,” Ravitch wrote. “Publishers, as a result, bend over backward to be positive, whether writing about the genocidal reign of Mao Tse-tung (presumably to avoid offending his admirers) or the unequal treatment of women in Islamic societies (to avoid offending Muslims).”
Texts should be accurate, Ravitch wrote, “but to impose contemporary political requirements on how the events are portrayed only ensures that the history we teach our students is inaccurate and dishonest.” In California, it certainly has been that.
The textbook An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600 showed Sikh founder Guru Nanak wearing a crown instead of a turban, and a beard that was trimmed instead of long, as alert Sikhs pointed out. At the time, the California Department of Education had no mechanism for ensuring that textbooks were “factually accurate.” Little wonder that errors became commonplace.
“Studies have found hundreds of errors in California textbooks,” says the website of the Textbook Trust, a watchdog group. The mistakes include geography, such as the notion that California’s southern border is the Rio Grande. It isn’t, and that river ventures nowhere near the Golden State, whose textbooks also fail to get