Objectivity in the Zeitgeist
The Education Ministry’s decision to withdraw a sixth-grade history textbook has triggered a storm. Some say that the selection of material for the school curriculum should not be up to the government but experts. However, we don’t live in Plato’s Republic but in a modern democracy where textbooks are written by scientists, under the influence of the Zeitgeist, and are ultimately selected by politicians. The controversy surrounding the book has from the very start been political rather than scientific. The reaction by National Education Council chairman Thanos Veremis who said that the government »is dancing to LAOS’s tune» was hardly scientific. The same goes for the historian Antonis Liakos, who said that «the extremities have now moved to the heart of the government.» Worse still, critics of the book have been portrayed as ultranationalists. But can this charge be leveled against such diverse figures as PASOK’s Costas Laliotis and Communist Party leader Aleka Papariga? Similarly, renowned liberal academics such as Giorgos Margaritis who criticized the content of the book in seminars and newspaper articles definitely don’t stand on the right edge of the political spectrum. Away from television, quality criticism centered more on what was not said in the textbook: The book does not contain a single reference to key historical facts such as the birth of the modern labor movement and of social democracy, the Russian Revolution or the collapse of colonial rule. The book suggests that the last six centuries have been a solitary Western European walk on the broad highway of History. Not a single word on Gandhi’s India, Mao’s China or Jefferson’s America. Those who put these critics in the same box as Giorgos Karatzaferis are practicing ideological terrorism while leaving the preservation of national culture to the extreme right.
