Students must remain skeptical of class material
Curriculum and textbook bias is a problem that exists in virtually every country, including our own. A story published in The Economist Saturday highlights these biases and the controversy it provokes, something that every student should think about.
We’ve all heard instances of textbook bias occurring in the far East, such as China. Chinese textbooks are infamous for excluding political and cultural events, such as the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, and praising the benefits of the authoritarian regimes and the one-child policy. Or take Palestine, where math textbooks were seen to incorporate example problems that reeked of anti-Semitism, or textbooks in Saudi Arabia, where Jews and Christians are portrayed as “enemies of the believers.”
Of course, textbook biases that occur in the United States are, as we’d like to think, much less extreme, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. U.S. nationalism and warped perspectives litter our educational environments, yet it’s a problem that many people remain unaware of. We spend so much time focusing on biases of other countries without realizing that there are a multitude of other more subtle factors that contribute to the way we choose to look at people and events. What’s most frightening is that one of these factors, arguably the largest factor, that shapes our perspectives is what we’ve been subjected to in our classrooms, from primary education to now.
In fact, just in 2010, the Texas board of education managed to remove Thomas Jefferson from the list of important revolutionary figures in the curriculum because he advocated the separation of church and state, two things that Texas thought should stay together. This sort of bias unfortunately continues into college, where it can become magnified with biases of the professor on top of textbook biases. Case in point: my international business class. In discussions of the downsides to free trade, my professor discussed how free trade could hurt local businesses in America, but the lecture didn’t even touch on the implications of free trade for developing countries or the toll it can take on their natural resources and people’s standard of living, a perspective that is critical to thorough understanding of the topic. It’s ironic, as an international business course is supposed to gear us to become “citizens of the world.”
As course curricula become more globalized, it’s easy to think that we are fortunate enough to be able to sit on a pedestal of neutrality and learn in a country where knowledge is uninhibited by restrictions and bias, but it’s not that way at all. It’s important that we always remain vigilant of our knowledge, to remain skeptical, to learn to not just be satisfied with the material that we are fed in our classrooms, but to actively seek it out in different mediums and sources, lest we unintentionally subject ourselves to unwanted prejudices.
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