Lots of Textbook Clean-up Needed

Submitted by Chris (United States), Aug 8, 2009 at 10:51

I hope this new cadre of Middle East Studies scholars will take a serious look at the elementary, high school, and college textbooks that have been released during the "ivory towers on sand" era and do some major clean-up. A case in point is the 7th grade textbook, "History Alive - The Medieval World and Beyond," which devotes 55 pages to Islam (mostly positive) and only 16 pages to Christianity (mostly negative). Judaism and Buddhism are hardly mentioned. With 78.5 percent of Americans belonging to various Christian faiths, and with Islam ranking behind Judaism and Buddhism in population, this seems like a major distortion in emphasis.

The next positive step would be to wrestle Middle East Studies departments from their financial dependence on endowments from the Middle East, which generally come with "strings attached." Academic studies should be completely independent, which is hardly the case in this field.

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