11-30-2006, 03:36 AM
SACRAMENTO
Groups seeking textbook revisions
Lessons on life in ancient India stir education hearing
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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A kind of Hindu civil war that wasn't always civil erupted in a Sacramento hearing room Monday over what California middle school students should be taught about ancient India.
An emotional four-hour hearing ended with a few angry members of the overflow audience shouting at a subcommittee of the state Board of Education after it rejected changes they sought in six new social studies textbooks for California middle school students. A security guard eventually cleared the room and ordered the crowd of almost 200 out of the building. "Learning about Hinduism in my sixth-grade class left me feeling ashamed and angry," Sameera Mokkarala, a sophomore at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, one of several dozen speakers, said during the hearing. "All that was talked about was the caste system, polytheism and sati." (Sati is the long-banned burning of widows on a husband's funeral pyre.)
The Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation are seeking to remove or soften references to the untouchable caste and the subordinate status of women in India more than 2,000 years ago, among other elements that the groups view as demeaning to their religion and humiliating to Hindu schoolchildren in California.
They also object to the theory that Indian development was heavily influenced by an Aryan invasion and to portrayals of Hinduism as polytheistic.
"I am appalled by the selective amnesia and fake history that is being advocated," Laju Shah, who teaches sixth- and seventh-grade social studies in San Francisco Unified School District, said of the changes the foundations sought.
Indian American children need to know "the truth behind their history," in which women had no rights to education, livelihood and social authority, she said.
The subcommittee's decision, which goes before the 11-member Board of Education on March 8, followed several months of conflict that prompted a counterprotest by a group of about 50 scholars. The dispute has sharply divided the U.S. Hindu community and thrown a monkey wrench into California's textbook approval process.
Both the state's Board of Education and its Curriculum Commission appointed committees to sort out the issues, and the final approval of the six textbooks next fall has been delayed for several months.
The pressure from the foundations "is a spillover from the Hindu nationalist movement," Rucha Ambikar, a Hindu from India and a graduate student, said before the hearing.
One critic of the two Hindu foundations called them "sectarian fanatics" and "bigots," while one of their supporters labeled the critics "communist terrorists."
A disappointed Piyush Bindai, who drove from Irvine for the hearing, said he belongs to the Dalit, or untouchable class.
"I know that those things happened in the past, but when my daughter learns about history, I want her to hear the positive, and then hear the negative things later," he said.
This round of new textbooks prompted unusual controversy, with more than 900 specific changes sought by various groups, said Thomas Adams, director of curriculum and textbooks for the Department of Education.
About 400 came from reviewers engaged by the state, while more than 500 came from the public, including many from Islamic and Jewish groups, as well as the two Hindu organizations, he said. The Hindu foundations submitted further changes after an initial vote by the Board of Education in September.
Among the contending groups with Hindu members were the Friends of South Asia and the Coalition Against Communalism, which opposed the foundations.
The issue grew more heated after the state's Curriculum Commission accepted several of the controversial changes late last year. A protest letter from about four dozen scholars, including Harvard Sanskrit Professor Michael Witzel, prompted the Board of Education to balk at the commission's approval of several changes sought by the two Hindu foundations, Adams said.
Several of the amendments proposed by the two foundations have been accepted, he said. Deleted, for example, were the Oxford University Press textbook's use of "Where's the Beef?" as a section title and a description of Hindus worshiping a monkey king, he said.
The textbooks don't give Hinduism the same respect as other religions, Vedic Foundation projects director Janeshwari Devi said after the hearing. Hindu scriptures are called myths and legends while other religious texts such as the Bible are accorded more weight as historical documents, she said.
Veena Dubal, an Indian American doctoral and law student at UC Berkeley, said she was "painfully embarrassed to read about the injustices committed in my parents' homeland" but asked the subcommittee not "to erase past and contemporary histories of oppression" or "to trade knowledge for pride."
Middle school history and social studies textbooks are revised every six years in California. Controversy over textbooks, even those used in math and science, is not rare, Adams said, but he acknowledged that the volume of comments on this round has been unusually large.
E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...BAGM5HFU5I1.DTL
Groups seeking textbook revisions
Lessons on life in ancient India stir education hearing
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
* Printable Version
* Email This Article
A kind of Hindu civil war that wasn't always civil erupted in a Sacramento hearing room Monday over what California middle school students should be taught about ancient India.
An emotional four-hour hearing ended with a few angry members of the overflow audience shouting at a subcommittee of the state Board of Education after it rejected changes they sought in six new social studies textbooks for California middle school students. A security guard eventually cleared the room and ordered the crowd of almost 200 out of the building. "Learning about Hinduism in my sixth-grade class left me feeling ashamed and angry," Sameera Mokkarala, a sophomore at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, one of several dozen speakers, said during the hearing. "All that was talked about was the caste system, polytheism and sati." (Sati is the long-banned burning of widows on a husband's funeral pyre.)
The Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation are seeking to remove or soften references to the untouchable caste and the subordinate status of women in India more than 2,000 years ago, among other elements that the groups view as demeaning to their religion and humiliating to Hindu schoolchildren in California.
They also object to the theory that Indian development was heavily influenced by an Aryan invasion and to portrayals of Hinduism as polytheistic.
"I am appalled by the selective amnesia and fake history that is being advocated," Laju Shah, who teaches sixth- and seventh-grade social studies in San Francisco Unified School District, said of the changes the foundations sought.
Indian American children need to know "the truth behind their history," in which women had no rights to education, livelihood and social authority, she said.
The subcommittee's decision, which goes before the 11-member Board of Education on March 8, followed several months of conflict that prompted a counterprotest by a group of about 50 scholars. The dispute has sharply divided the U.S. Hindu community and thrown a monkey wrench into California's textbook approval process.
Both the state's Board of Education and its Curriculum Commission appointed committees to sort out the issues, and the final approval of the six textbooks next fall has been delayed for several months.
The pressure from the foundations "is a spillover from the Hindu nationalist movement," Rucha Ambikar, a Hindu from India and a graduate student, said before the hearing.
One critic of the two Hindu foundations called them "sectarian fanatics" and "bigots," while one of their supporters labeled the critics "communist terrorists."
A disappointed Piyush Bindai, who drove from Irvine for the hearing, said he belongs to the Dalit, or untouchable class.
"I know that those things happened in the past, but when my daughter learns about history, I want her to hear the positive, and then hear the negative things later," he said.
This round of new textbooks prompted unusual controversy, with more than 900 specific changes sought by various groups, said Thomas Adams, director of curriculum and textbooks for the Department of Education.
About 400 came from reviewers engaged by the state, while more than 500 came from the public, including many from Islamic and Jewish groups, as well as the two Hindu organizations, he said. The Hindu foundations submitted further changes after an initial vote by the Board of Education in September.
Among the contending groups with Hindu members were the Friends of South Asia and the Coalition Against Communalism, which opposed the foundations.
The issue grew more heated after the state's Curriculum Commission accepted several of the controversial changes late last year. A protest letter from about four dozen scholars, including Harvard Sanskrit Professor Michael Witzel, prompted the Board of Education to balk at the commission's approval of several changes sought by the two Hindu foundations, Adams said.
Several of the amendments proposed by the two foundations have been accepted, he said. Deleted, for example, were the Oxford University Press textbook's use of "Where's the Beef?" as a section title and a description of Hindus worshiping a monkey king, he said.
The textbooks don't give Hinduism the same respect as other religions, Vedic Foundation projects director Janeshwari Devi said after the hearing. Hindu scriptures are called myths and legends while other religious texts such as the Bible are accorded more weight as historical documents, she said.
Veena Dubal, an Indian American doctoral and law student at UC Berkeley, said she was "painfully embarrassed to read about the injustices committed in my parents' homeland" but asked the subcommittee not "to erase past and contemporary histories of oppression" or "to trade knowledge for pride."
Middle school history and social studies textbooks are revised every six years in California. Controversy over textbooks, even those used in math and science, is not rare, Adams said, but he acknowledged that the volume of comments on this round has been unusually large.
E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...BAGM5HFU5I1.DTL