forbidden knowledge

I was a teenager when perestroika hit my native country, Soviet Union. First came a flood of long supressed historical facts, and the so-called 'reevaluation of values'. All of a sudden, building the bright future was no longer a lofty goal; everyone looked back and was horrified at the price of the country's accoomplishments during the past 70 years.

Our history textbooks became completely obsolete. I don't think my history teacher opened them at all. By the end of high school, my country's history has been completely rewritten, and I developed a firm contempt towards history as a branch of human knowledge. There is no truth to it, I thought bitterly; all historians do is rewrite books when politically necessary. Winners write history. Whoever pays the piper orders a tune. Shame.

If you think this can't happen here, think again.

In her book The language Police , Diane Ravitch documents eforts from both right and left to strike out 'objectionable' words from school textbooks. Below is a sample of such words and topics from the book, as quoted here :


Anchorman (banned as sexist, replace with “anchor person” or “newscaster”), p. 171
Bitch (banned as reference to female dog), p.172
Bookworm (banned as offensive, replace with “intellectual”), p.172 – ditto: Egghead p. 175
Cro-Magnon Man (banned as sexist, replace with “Cro-Magnon people”), p. 173
Dirty old man (banned as sexist and ageist), p.174
Fat (banned, replace with “heavy” or “obese”), p.175
Fellowship (banned as sexist, replace with “Friendship”), p. 175 (Sisterhood is not mentioned)
Founding Fathers (banned as sexist, replace with “the founders, the framers”), p.175
[..]
Satan (banned), p. 182 – God is also banned, p. 176
Yacht (banned as elitist), p. 183

Among the images to Avoid are: Women who are not team players; Men or boys in active problem-solving roles; People of color who abandon their own culture or language to achieve success; American Indians as primitive or warlike; Asian Americans as working in a laundry or as musical prodigies or class valedictorians; Latinos who are lazy or passive; Mexicans grinding corn or riding donkeys; Jews always wearing business suits, glasses, and carrying briefcases; People with disabilities as saintly like Tiny Tim, or as a burden to others; Fat social misfits; Old ladies with twenty cats; and Irish policemen, pages 184-194

Among the topics to avoid are: Conflict with authority (parents, teachers, law); Crime; Dialect (especially black dialect); evolution presented as fact rather than scientific theory; Guns and shooting; Lying or duplicity of any kind; Physical violence; References to Humanism that might give it the status of religion; Religion; Unpunished transgressions; or Winter holidays (probably because of the pagan origins of many of them -Y.B.), pages 194-195



There is also a list of books forbidden in school libraries or removed from school reading lists around the country. It is actually very extensive and can be found here . Included are Catcher in the Rye, Alice in Wonderland, both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Advetuntures of Heck Finn, Brave New World, Gone With The Wind, and basically every other known book.

The newest victim of special interest groups lobbying is the history of India as described in school textbooks. Apparently, this year, the State of California has commissioned 6th grade history books. During the reviewing process, two conservative US-based Hindu groups came forwards with changes, amounting to rewriting and whitewashing the country's history :


Instigating the California debate were two US-based Hindu groups with long ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to the worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing Indian group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

[..] In one edit, the HEF asked the textbook publisher to change a sentence describing discrimination against women in ancient society to the following: "Men had different duties (dharma) as well as rights than women."

In another edit, the HEF objected to a sentence that said that Aryan rulers had "created a caste system" in India that kept groups separated according to their jobs. The HEF asked this to be changed to the following: "During Vedic times, people were divided into different social groups (varnas) based on their capacity to undertake a particular profession."

The hottest debate centered on when Indian civilization began, and by whom. For the past 150 years, most historical, linguistic, and archaeological research has dated India's earliest settlements to around 2600 BC. And most established historical research contends that the cornerstone of Indian civilization - the practice of Hindu religion - was codified by people who came from outside India, specifically Aryan language speakers from the steppes of Central Asia.

Many Hindu nationalists are upset by the notion that Hinduism could be yet another religion, like Islam and Christianity, with foreign roots. The HEF and Vedic Foundation both lobbied hard to change the wording of California's textbooks so that Hinduism would be described as purely home grown.[..]



A Wall Street Journal article today (you have to be a subscriber to access) deals with this issue blow by blow. It also explains why this issue concerns everyone in this country, not just Californians. California is the biggest customer of eduicational textbooks, accounting for 10%-12% of the market. If California want changes made in their textbooks, it is more economically feasible for the publisher to adopt their version as the standard text. As a result, everyone gets the washed-out Californian books.

Christian, Jewish, Muslim groups also constantly put pressure on educational resource publishers. Trouble is, the history of human sociaty from times immemorial is largely the history of CONFLICT between these groups. There is absolutely no way to make everyone happy, unless history is stripped off of most of its unpleasant facts. And we are left with a certain consensus reality, far different from what actually is. Apparently, this is quite allright with those who rpomote the changes:

"There is no such thing as an objective history," Jain says. "So when we write a textbook, we should make students aware of the status of current research of leading scholars in the field. It should not shut out a love for motherland, a pride in your past. If you teach that your country is backward, that it has no redeeming features in our civilization, it can damage a young perspective."

With all the recent talk about India being the new rising superpower, it all makes sense. What better way to unite people than a strong national idea backed by a monotheistic-type religion.

Make no mistake, the debate here is not about who got the facts right, even though schoarly debates were conducted to thouroughly investigate the issue.

This is all about who gets to influence the minds of growing children. The power of this tactic can not be underestimated. When one generation is raised on different books and differe views, it is enough to completely obliterate the whole area of human knowledge. And create a brave new world.

However, I can tell you that it damages a young prospective a lot more to realize, little by little as you are growing up, that you are told twisted lies. That a lot of things are hidden from you. That your textbook tells an optimistic story, but has a glitch here and there, hinting that there is a grimer reality behind it all. And you, having no point of reference to make sense of those glitches, feel utterly lost. And then everything crumbles, as it usually does, and you realize that your own people are not as noble as portraied, but rather are cruel or apathetic, unfair of tyrannical, .. well basically they are people like everyone else.

And this is what is.

I'll stick to living books when I teach my own children.

News
censorship

do YOU have a dangerous idea?

A friend recently sent me a link to an online discussion at the World Question Center. Their topic for 2006 is ‘What is your dangerous idea?’ In response to this question, prominent philosophically-minded scientists weigh in with their comments on what ideas may be "socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous [..] not because [they] are assumed to be false, but because [they] may be true".

I browsed quickly through the comments. There is a range of opinions across the spectrum from 'science has no chance against religion' to 'there is no God'. There is a lot on similar wishy-washy false dichotomies, but precious little on what is really going on in our daily life.

Robert Schank does write eloquently on failures of the education system:

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

[..]

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.


Of course I agree with him. But, 1 out of 50 kids already being homeschooled, this dangerous idea is hardly revolutionary and thus not nearly as dangerous as it perhaps was 20 years ago.

C'mon, don't you guys have anything MORE to say? Anything that is TRULY dangerous, anything that would upset the illusion we live in so much as to draw the incinerating wrath of the Powers To Be?

I have a couple of such ideas to suggest. How about these:

- There are among the rest of us people without conciense , unable to fell genuine emotion and empathy, no remorse or sense of responsibility -- and they do whatever they want, without shame, as long as they can get away with it. These people are called psychopaths, or more recently, socipaths. People who had dealt with such individuals can attest on their destructive effect on every normal aspect of human existence.

- Worse still, our social and polical system has been hijacked by psychopaths from time immemorial. Quoting from Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes (by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Ph.D.
with commentary and additional quoted material
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk) :

Pathocracy is a disease of great social movements followed by entire societies, nations, and empires. In the course of human history, it has affected social, political, and religious movements as well as the accompanying ideologies… and turned them into caricatures of themselves…. This occurred as a result of the … participation of pathological agents in a pathodynamically similar process. That explains why all the pathocracies of the world are, and have been, so similar in their essential properties.

Doesn't this explain almost EVERYTHING that has been going on recently?

You have probably seen the Pentagon Strike video already. After all, this is one of the most widely disseminated pieces of information on the Internet. While it answers a lot of questions some people have, there are money other people who completely reject the information, based solely on an emotional reaction, "I don't believe it! This simply can not happen here, in our country, the freest democracy in the world".

This reaction underscores our very basic desire to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the world is fair, and all people are basically good but sometimes commit commiting bad action because they are mistaking, or ingorant, or are hurting inside.

People's minds are fighting all out against the notions that I put forward above. And when the evidence pointing to the organized psychopathic evil in high places, some say in disdain, 'those conspiracy nuts again'. This has become a derogatory label. Yet, as explained here :

Conspiracy theory is more thoughtful than fearful. The motivations
behind conspiracy theory research are cognitive and social. It is very
much like doing family genealogy. You begin with a few facts. Then you
puzzle out the story, make inferences and hypotheses, and seek further
facts. With help from other people, with good luck, you discover
information that is sometimes difficult to find. A story emerges,
suggesting new facts that should be sought. The satisfaction comes from
finding the facts, constructing the story, and sharing the process and
discoveries with other people.

It appears that conspiracy research has been labeled, marginalized, and often times corrupted precisely because it sometimes hits upon truly DANGEROUS ideas.

The article Evidence That a Frozen Fish Didn't Impact the Pentagon on 9/11 and Neither Did a Boeing 757 takes the reader through just such process of corruption.

In conclusion, this is what I would like to say to the prominent philosophically-minded scientists:

For the idea to be truly dangerous, it must move your very being and really cut through the illusion of our existence. And it must be the hill that you are willing to die on.

Otherwise -- talk is cheap.

Now, DO you have a dangerous idea?

Technorati categories: News, Science, Politics,Homeschooling

Thank you Caitlin Flanagan!

We have just yesterday received a current issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Late into last night I have been reading Caitlin Flanagan's essay on the casual oral sex among teens and tweens .

My strong recommendation to every mother is to grab the magazin from a local library, or shell out for subscription, for this essay alone. Read -- and weep.

Ms. Flanagan's writing is of impeccable taste, and her quirky style makes me laugh every time I read her essays (although this one is no laughing matter). She is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, writing primarily on women's issues.

I plugged her name into Google just now and was surprised to find out that she is viewed by some as an anti-feminist writer. On of her previous pieces titled Nanny Wars has rattled a lot of people, who blamed her for undermining women's right to work. I don't want to get into a discussion about feminism in this blog (just yet, anyway). I will only say that IMO Ms. Flanagan seems to understand that modern women live in a complex world where you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, and where any real help is hard to come by.

As someone pointed out on the Ms Magazine's website discussion: 'Caitlin Flanagan states the sad truth. It points directly to our ugly culture—not the shortcomings of women.' I think the above applies 100% to her conclusions in her new piece. Says Caitlin Flanagan:

"As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of a post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households -- individual mothers and fathers - are protecting children from porhography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on village but to protect my children from it."

I couldn't help recalling a quote by Maria Arbatova, a contemporary Russian writer, and the foremost Russian feminist. Note though that in Russia the common understanding of what feminism is, differs somewhat from the Wikipedia definition. Work was never a issue to debate since Russian women always worked. However, if your husband does dishes once in a while, then you are a certified feminist. Go figure.

Anyways, in her book 'I am 40', Ms. Arbatova describes her life, full of absurdity imparted by the no longer existing Soviet system. When she talks about raising her sons, she says (in paraphrase),

"As a mother, I felt that my duty to my children was to fight the system that was out to hurt them."

These two women come from geographically opposite ends of the world, live in socially and politically very different cultures, and bear opposite labels of 'feminist' and an 'anti-feminist', respectively. Isn't it ironic then that they hold a very similar, if not identical, views when it comes to their children's well-being, and moral and physical safety?

Christiane Northrup in her book 'Women's bodies, women's wisdom' suggests replacing 'patriarhal culture' with 'addictive culture', when discussing women's issues. Feminism then can be redefined as any aspect of human life and endeavor that seeks to replace the addictive system of life and relationship with a wholesome one.

This new definition would help understand why women from different cultures and views on feminism agree on some very important issues. It would also show that many of those who talk about feminism don't truly have its spirit at heart. While those who profess to hate feminism sometimes are, deep down, the biggest feminists of them all.