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History textbooks to be dropped amid controversy
By Tsai Wen-chu / Staff reporter
Greater Tainan political figures are calling for the scrapping of three history textbooks from senior-high schools, because of what they said were inaccuracies over Taiwanese history.
Tainan Councilor Lee Wen-cheng (李文正) and Provisional Government of Formosa chief convener Sim Kian-tek (沈建德) said at a press conference on Friday that they had found at least three “toxic textbooks” for first-year high-school students, in which the publishers stated that “the Cairo Declaration supported the restoration of Taiwan and the Pescadores to the Republic of China” in the Taiwanese history section.
The declaration was not legally binding, Lee and Sim said, asking the city government to “clamp down on” the materials.
The city’s Bureau of Education director-general Cheng Pang-chen (鄭邦鎮) said that while the city’s public and private high schools and vocational high schools could not be forced to take action over the textbooks, supplementary learning materials would be handed out to the four municipal high schools.
Cheng said that the Cairo Declaration lacked legal effect and he had voiced his opposition in a heated bureau meeting debate over the curriculum controversy, saying: “If [a textbook] is in violation of historical truth, Greater Tainan will not be using it.”
This distortion is similar to “having Noah’s ark, which was for saving, change into a pirate ship,” he said. “Noah’s ark could never become a pirate ship.”
Cheng said that there are more than 40 public and private high schools and vocational high schools in Greater Tainan, which are not under the city government’s jurisdiction, but the city government could have the four municipal comprehensive junior-senior high schools adopt the preferred version.
The city government would hand out supplementary materials to those schools to counterbalance the parts of the textbooks that have been considered historically inaccurate, Cheng said.
“It could be done this semester, and will be done regardless of any possible resistance,” he said.
source: Taipei Times
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