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Japan's past keeps evolving, especially when it comes to World War II. Historians have long believed that the Japanese army forced civilians to commit suicide at the end of the battle of Okinawa, which was about to fall to the U.S. That's the story Japanese student textbooks told too, until the government announced on March 30 that it had ordered publishers to delete those passages. Instead one textbook now reads that Okinawans were "driven to mass suicide," without mentioning the army's role. The change is the latest controversial tweak by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who also recently...
There's no better textbook example of the Web reinvigorating an old-school medium than the humble comic strip. (Um, besides porn, that is.) Comic strips in newspapers are dying. They're starved for space, crushed down to a fraction of their original size. They're choked creatively by ironfisted syndicates and the 1950s-era family values that newspapers impose. But on the Web there are no space restrictions. Need I add that the same goes for family values? Now that DIY ad serving is cheap and easy, cartoonists can go into business for themselves online, and syndicates and newspapers...
Haynes also brought in Chuck Stetson, who wanted to take the next step: a secularly acceptable Bible textbook. Stetson's religious credentials alarm church-state separationists. He is a graduate of Colson's Wilberforce Centurion project, a study group pledged to "restore our culture by effectively thinking, teaching and advocating the Christian world view as applied to all of life." Yet he claims his commitment to his textbook's constitutionality determined its secularity. In late 2005 he unveiled The Bible and Its Influence, which was vetted by 40 religious and legal scholars, including Jews, Protestants and a Roman Catholic bishop...
...Boston of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State have expressed a concern about how teachers willing to give the Bible secular treatment would be found, particularly in states where vast majorities are evangelical. They note that Stetson's history sections are almost exclusively positive. "A textbook should offer objective study about both the positive and negative uses of the Bible," Conn writes. "Where is the analysis of the role of the Bible in the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials?" They specifically question the tone of a final section, "Freedom and Faith in America," which omits...
...Bible's harmful as well as helpful uses must be addressed, which could be done by acknowledging that religious conservatives see the problems as stemming from the abuse of the holy text, while others think the text itself may be the culprit. The course should have a strong accompanying textbook on the model of The Bible and Its Influence but one that is willing to deal a bit more bluntly with the historical warts. And some teacher training is a must: at a bare minimum, about their constitutional obligations...