Where’s the Beef? Five of the World’s More Unusual Textbook Kerfuffles

A long-simmering conflict over Japan’s actions during World War II flared up again this week as a group of Japanese scholars filed a complaint about a history textbook published by U.S. company McGraw-Hill. The scholars say the text contains several “factual errors” and question the narrative of the so-called “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by Japan’s military during the war.

Many countries massage their histories, but fairly or not, Japan gets an especially bad rap for it. South Korea and China rail against the country’s historical revisionism on issues like wartime casualties and the infamous human experimentation operation at Unit 731; Japan says China and Korea exaggerate or unduly dwell on these topics. The questions of history have strained relations among these countries, and this week’s controversy isn’t the first time it’s touched the United States, where Korean communities have battled Japanese diplomats over curricula and memorials to wartime atrocities.

Most countries and groups once on different sides of conflict face these sorts of struggles. Textbook tussles between India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, various Balkan countries, Turkey and Armenia, Greece, and Cyprus, and others, center around issues such as who was at fault and when. Critics say countries including Russia, Iran, China, the United States, and several others use schoolbooks as propaganda. But textbook troubles have also erupted over some more surprising questions. Here are a few:

Is California’s curriculum mocking Hindu vegetarians?

In 2005, two Hindu foundations spearheaded an effort to revise California history and social studies textbooks they said portrayed their religion unfairly. They complained that the books blamed Hinduism for the repression of lower castes and women in India, and that the authors’ dismissive attitude was clear in passages like one on vegetarianism titled “Where’s the Beef?”. Scholars and low caste advocacy groups pushed back, saying the state shouldn’t allow “politically-minded revisionists to change Indian history.” The dispute escalated into multiple lawsuits, the last settled in 2009, and a state-organized head-to-head debate between two of the opposing scholars. “It was a gladiator combat,” one of them told the Wall Street Journal, “the most acrimonious thing I have ever done in my entire life.” The state ultimately accepted some but not all of the suggested changes.

(Indian vegetarians aren’t always on the defensive in these battles. In 2012, academics protested when a major Indian textbook company published a health volume for pre-teens that alleged meat-eaters “easily cheat, lie, forget promises, and commit sex crimes.”)

Did Saudi textbooks cause 9/11?

Probably not. But given that 15 of the 19 hijackers in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were Saudis, Americans seeking to explain the tragedy set their sights on the Gulf state’s extraordinarily intolerant school primers. A 2006 Freedom House report raised concerns that these books instructed students to shun unbelievers, with one 12th grade text even urging youths to wage violent jihad. The United States called for urgent revisions, and the late King Abdullah said they’d get right on it. But a 2013 State Department report on the U.S. ally found that “intolerant content remained, even in revised textbooks, including justification for the social exclusion and killing of Islamic minorities and ‘apostates.’” It added that “the textbooks also stated treachery was a ‘permanent characteristic’ of non-Muslims, especially Jews, propagated conspiracy theories that international organizations such as Masons support Zionism, and presented historical forgeries, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as fact.”

How big was Canada’s role in World War I?

A much older, more obscure textbook brouhaha broke out in 1920 in New Brunswick, Canada, over a General History written by one P.V.N. Myers, an American historian. The book didn’t mention Canada’s contributions to World War I, angry New Brunswickers complained, and overplayed the United States’ role. “We have been at a loss here to understand how it is possible, if there is any kind of supervision of the textbooks,” one concerned citizen wrote to the local Daily Gleaner, “that the poison in the last chapter of Myers’ could get into the schools easily to do its deadly work on the minds of the growing boy and girl.” Other letters from parents, patriots, and journalists flooded the province’s education board until it replaced the offending tome with a British-penned one.

Was Chile really a “dictatorship” under Pinochet?

It’s not unusual for democracies to gloss over bloody portions of their histories, as Indonesian educators battling the silence over 1960s purges of the Indonesian Communist Party know well. But perhaps particularly audacious was the Chilean National Education Council’s decision in 2012 that the brutal government of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, shouldn’t be called a “dictatorship.” The term “regime” was more appropriate, the council said. The decision drew angry responses from critics of then-president Sebastián Piñera’s conservative government, and from the many who’d suffered under the Pinochet junta, which tortured and killed thousands of dissenters after ousting the country’s elected leader, Salvador Allende. In 2013, the council changed its mind, deciding that the repressive right-wing government had been, in fact, a dictatorship.

And what’s with Texas?

No list of textbook wars would be complete without a mention of Texas, a state where conservatives have been vigorously attempting — and often succeeding — to censor and revise textbooks since at least the 1960s. Last fall, Texas’s Board of Education approved new history textbooks that portray Moses as a democratic leader who served as a key source of inspiration for America’s founding fathers — a characterization that’s added to concerns about the state’s ability, or perhaps desire, to separate itself from the church. Critics on the right, meanwhile, say the books haven’t done enough to address worries raised in 2010 that the curriculum “resists ugly facts about Islam.” Like textbook decisions in California, the nation’s largest state, those in Texas, its second largest, often ripple out to other states. Residents of the Lone Star State were among the first to call for a ban on AP U.S. History, a motion currently before the Oklahoma legislature due to the course’s perceived lack of patriotism and failure to celebrate “American exceptionalism.”

STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images