Opinion

Textbook Controversy

By DOUGLAS LUMMIS

In Japan when there is a controversy about textbooks the issue is usually the history textbooks. What is constantly in question is the nature of the Fifteen Years' War and Japan's responsibility for it.

But in the textbook debate presently going on in San Francisco, the issue is not war but ethnicity, and the books being disputed are not the history textbooks, but the literature textbooks.

Recently two members of the San Francisco school board proposed that the city should enforce a quota system in its teaching of literature: For every 10 books required in its English (the equivalent of kokugo) classes, seven should be written by authors of color.

The argument for doing this is strong. Presently 87 percent of the students in the San Francisco school system are members of ethnic minorities, the largest groups being Asian and Latino. Traditionally, the vast majority of works of literature taught in U.S. schools were written by white males. Literature has an educational effect when it speaks to the experience of the reader. Teaching only from the canon of white authors may teach minorities only that the world is dominated by people unlike themselves. This can contribute to the terrible alienation that minority students feel in the U.S. educational system. This, in turn, can contribute to teenage illiteracy and crime. One critic spoke of "the express train between the public schools and the Department of Corrections."

On the other hand, teachers feel insulted by the quota proposal. "(It) puts me in a straitjacket and nullifies my profession as a teacher," said one. They point out that they are using many books by minority writers already. One white teacher said he is teaching Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" because the book is excellent literature. A quota system would teach the students that the book is being taught only because Ellison was black.

Other teachers argue that it is the students who must decide what literature is educationally effective. Most competent teachers select their reading lists by trial and error, continuing to use only those books that "work" in the classroom. And they find (unsurprisingly) that students are moved not only by books written by members of their own ethnic groups. If what matters is whether the literature speaks to the experience of the reader, this depends on what is written, not on the ethnicity of who wrote it. Teachers may have better results even with Shakespeare if they have the imagination to realize that "Romeo and Juliet" is the story of a knife fight between two teenage gangs.

The debate will not end soon. One letter to the local newspaper said, "It's great that people are getting excited over books the reign of the couch potato propped before the tube is being dealt a few blows. Yippee!"

Shukan ST: April 3, 1998

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