Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Politically Correct Information for all.

I read an article today about a popular text book publishing company being accused of letting political correctness get in the way of writing a factually correct text book. The story illustrates some new Haughton Mifflin textbooks that have been edited to remove embarrassing or controversial information about Islam. This scares me, because it illustrates the fact that education is no longer the presentation of facts and un-diluted truth, though one could argue it never really was. Education has now become the dissemination of a political agenda or a certain set of facts that are deemed politically safe or, politically correct. What piece of history is next to fall under the chopping block, will we remove the Holocaust from our textbooks because it offends Germanic peoples? Will we edit out the fact that European settlers in the Americas slaughtered the native populaces because it offends Europeans? Will we remove from history the attack on Pearl Harbor because it might offend the Japanese, or maybe we’ll edit out the incidents in Tiananmen Square because it offends Chinese folks? Where is the stopping point in the editing of history, where do we put an end to the wholesale destruction of our past because our ancestors did something offensive to our current political climate? You know, I’m a 25yr old White Southern Protestant male, and I don’t like the presentation of the South as slavers and all around bad guys that our current history books portray. Maybe I’ll create a special interest group to lobby for the South to be viewed as a poor immigration service who failed to provide proper compensation to the African Immigrants that were brought to this country.