The director of the American Textbook Publishers Institute admitted today the accuracy of a formal charge that most textbooks used in American public schools present a one-sided picture of minority groups and promised prompt action to correct such shortcomings.
Dr. Austin McCaffrey accepted the charge by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and noted that some of these books were written years ago. “Times have changed, ” he said, “Views and orientations have changed. No one will say that texts developed thus far are as good as they ought to be.”
The complaint emerged from a 10-month study of 48 textbooks on social studies made Dr. Lloyd Marcus, director of the ADL department of research and development. Dr. Maicus asserted that the texts gave “a partial, inadequate and distorted view” of Jews, Nazi atrocities, Negroes and immigrants.
As two examples, he cited a statement from a problems of democracy text and one from a world history text. The first statement was: “Some minorities have been ridiculed for inferior education and living standards. Jews, on the other hand, it is alleged, ‘succeed too well too fast.’ They do ‘too well’ in business. They are too able in school. They are called pushers. ” The other citation reads: “In the 1920’s, Hitler constantly attacked the feebleness of the republic that tolerated the traitorous acts of Jews and Communists.
Dr. McCaffrey said that the ADL study appeared to be “very objective, very searching and that it merited “a great deal of attention ” in the book publishing industry.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
