Racist textbooks to be banned

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33110, 28 December 1972, Page 5

Racist textbooks to be banned

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) TORONTO, December 27. Education authorities in Toronto have begun a campaign to eliminate racial prejudice from school textbooks, after an official survey that reported nearly a third of prescribed texts contain racial or ethnic slurs.

Of 1320 textbooks author-1 < ised for use in the Canadian i 1 province of Ontario. 370 were , said to contain some racial ( or ethnic prejudice—much of i it against Canadian Indians. > This was the finding of a ! team of 200 appointed by the Provincial Government to ex- i amine the books for nreiu- ’

dice in ideas, pictures and i vocabulary. The offending books will be eliminated gradually, but the evaluation committee will remain on watch, and all new textbooks will be submitted to it before they are approved for school use. The committee discovered in its review that prejudice can appear in many forms—and in scientific as well as historical texts. In Canadian history books, the survey showed, Indians were usually described as “massacring” whites. Yet whites who wiped out large numbers of Indians were said to have taken “punitive action.” or, as one textbook (described it, “destroyed vilI (ages and crops and badly destroyed Iroquois confidence.” One elementary school textbook, in a “creativity exercise,” gave the student a drawing of Indians shooting dead two whites driving a waggon and asked the student to “create a story from this picture.” An illustration in another i textbook showed a child holding an arrow and saying, I“I bet this arrowhead was used to kill a white man.” DEROGATORY TERMS The committee discovered that 19 derogatory terms were used 895 times in the l books in relation to Eskimos and Indians. They included: half-breed, savage, massacre,' torture, primitive, ignorant. | wild, cruel, murder, dirty, thieving, lazy, untrustworthy, naked, drunken, liar, foul arid bloodthirsty. These epithets were virtually never applied to white? people. The committee found that even one text book on electrical theory displayed prejudice. *