Missing Pages: 9/11 and the Battle Over Textbooks
Japanese historians Nozaki Yoshiko and Inokuchi Hiromatsu once described school textbooks as an “important site” for “creating and disseminating narratives.” By projecting a specific viewpoint of an event on the impressionable minds of students, the books can “readily reinforce dominant ideologies.” It was while reading an essay by these authors for a class on Asia-Pacific wars that I first became aware of the power of textbooks to not only educate our youth but construct an entire ideological mindset.
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Eric Lukas is a junior at Columbia University, where he is majoring in history. He also served as senior editor on the Columbia Political Review, where this article was first published in November 2007. Eric was a summer intern in the Communications Department of the Middle East Institute in 2007.
