Truth in textbooks

If you're wondering about just what American textbooks say about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, here are a couple of useful links.

The first one is to a study by Gary Tobin and Dennis Ybarra that draws some disturbing conclusions from a survey of the 28 most widely used textbooks in U.S. public schools. Among their findings: "The textbooks tend to be critical of Jews and Israel, and sometimes disrespectful of Christianity. Moreover textbooks tend to glorify Islam rather than represent it in an objective way... the Muslim groups who insisted that their religion be presented in an uncritical fashion seem to have their narrative included without modification."

Robert Spencer provides a specific example of such a presentation in a recent blog entry. Here, Christians are described as those who believe in Jesus, while the Koran is simply described as the word of Allah. This may not seem, in and of itself, to be such a big thing. But when it's linked to other themes, such as denying any historical link between Jews and Israel, you have to wonder what's going on.

Tobin and Ybarra don't argue that the textbook publishers are even aware of these problems. Rather, they describe shortcomings in how textbooks are produced that leave them vulnerable to distortions.