Bowing to Sikhs' Call, California Wants Textbook Change

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SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, March 12, 2007: The picture on Page 95 of "An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600," a seventh-grade history book used in California schools since last fall, had been unremarkable to state education officials: a stiff 19th-century portrait of a man with a trimmed beard holding a few beads and wearing a crown. But for Sikhs, that image of Guru Nanak (1469-1538), their religion's founder, is anathema to everything they believe about the prophet, a simple man who preached to the poor and certainly, they say, never wore a crown. So, after months of lobbying by Sikhs, the California Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday to ask the book's publisher to remove the portrait from future printings, and to provide a sticker with another image or text to place over the portrait in existing copies. "The image itself was offensive to the Sikh community," said Thomas Adams, director of the Curriculum Frameworks and Instructional Resources Division of the State Education Department. "And it wasn't defensible on the issue of accuracy, because it is from a later period" than the one in which Guru Nanak lived.

 

Sikhs, who trace their religion to the late-15th-century Punjab region of what are now Pakistan and India, number some 24 million around the world and about 500,000 in the United States, says the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, based in Washington. According to Kavneet Singh, the fund's Western regional director, 75,000 to 100,000 live in California, though some estimates put the number at twice that. Many arrived in the United States in two waves, immigrating either as laborers during the early 20th century or as skilled professionals since World War II. Sikhs in California had pushed to have the picture removed from the text ever since the book first arrived in schools at the start of the academic year.

 

Gurcharan Singh Mann, a Sikh who lives in Fremont and who was active in the effort, said that in addition to the crown, the trim of Guru Nanak's beard was in the style of a Muslim or a Hindu rather than a Sikh. "It is not a suitable picture," Mr. Singh Mann said. "Every Sikh at their home has a picture of Guru Nanak, and it looks like the modern dress of the Sikh, of the 21st century, with a turban and a fully grown beard." The book's publisher, Oxford University Press, did not return a call for comment. But education officials and other publishing houses said the episode was just the latest example of a textbook change prompted by concerns about giving offense to various racial, ethnic or religious groups. California's school board has a public -- and often lengthy -- process of reviewing textbooks before they are made available for purchase by individual school districts. Last year, for example, the board took comments from a variety of groups, including representatives of the Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religions, each looking for changes to a proposed social sciences curriculum. The textbooks were approved last March, but only after the board had given publishers a 126-page list of suggested tweaks, trims and fixes. "This has always been the story of the California adoption process," Mr. Adams said. "It is intended for the public to participate. It's not intended for a bureaucrat like myself to sit behind a desk and do it comfortably."

 

But publishers say that with the rise in cultural sensitivity and in new educational standards, including those from federal programs like No Child Left Behind, the cost and time consumed in making schoolbooks have also increased. "We jump through a lot of hoops, and a great deal of money is spent in terms of developing materials," said Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers. "And there's a very strong correlation, particularly in California, that the new standards do indeed lead to more pages and lead to more costs." Still, publishers usually make the changes, if only because of California's size and buying power. The schoolbook market in the United States is roughly US$4.2 billion, Mr. Diskey said, and California schools are the nation's No. 1 purchaser: the state government allocated $403 million for schoolbooks in 2006, Mr. Adams said, not counting federal money or lottery revenue. Mr. Singh Mann said the depiction of Guru Nanak was important not only for historical reasons but also to help keep students from confusing Sikhs with other ethnic groups. He said that several Sikhs were assaulted after the attacks of Sept. 11 and that some non-Sikh students still treated Sikhs with suspicion or worse. "You're in the school and some kids have a turban, they'll be called Osama bin Laden," Mr. Singh Mann said. "And the kids want to drop out the school. We don't want to be a burden on the country, but if a kid drops out, it is a problem."