When Hindu nationalists ran the government in India, they rewrote the history textbooks to deny non-Hindu influence on India’s culture. Now that they’re out of power, the textbooks are being re-rewritten, reports the Guardian.

The “saffronisation” of history, say critics of the last government, depicted India’s Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule which snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded it.

Memorably, one textbook claimed that the Taj Mahal, the Qu’tb Minar and the Red Fort, three of India’s outstanding examples of Islamic architecture, were designed and commissioned by Hindus.

The books denied India’s history of migration, downplayed the evils of the caste system and even neglected to mention that a Hindu nationalist assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Via Brian, who includes a bonus photo of the Taj Mahal. I must learn how to do photos on the blog. Some day.

At a public high school in a Milwaukee suburb, the school newspaper turned down a military recruitment ad on grounds it violated the ad policy, which bans businesses and organizations “deemed destructive to the social, economic and environmental health of the earth and all of its inhabitants.” Editor Bix Firer, 17, told the Journal Sentinel he didn’t want Shorewood High‘s newspaper, Ripples, to help “warmongers.”

Shorewood is a liberal town near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (Firer’s parents are both UWM English professors.)

“At Shorewood,” says Nick Pierson, who wrote for Ripples under the name “Mad Max,” “everyone’s got this mind-set that everyone’s going to go to like a really high-level college and these very prestigious universities.

“A lot of people think the military is below them.”

. . . Firer says he rejected the advertising money from the military in part because of the war in Iraq, which he says is further destablizing an unstable area.

He also says the military is “both classist and racist in its approach.”

“I realize this is sort of absurd coming from a privileged, white male, but the recruitment sort of targets those with fewer opportunities,” Firer says.

Well, the recruiter wanted to target Shorewood High students, but never got the chance to offer them a military option.

Mike Halloran, an English teacher and Ripples advisor, once taught at St. Francis High, which sends a comparatively high percentage of graduates into the military. He told the reporter that most St. Francis parents stressed a “sort of blind respect for authority.” By contrast, “There are questioners (at Shorewood),” Halloran says.

I bet there are a lot of group thinkers at Shorewood.

Update: Pierson, who told the Journal-Sentinel that soldiers have an “honorable profession” and said he he’d considered military service, was contacted by a Marine Corps recruiter after the story ran and came close to accepting a Navy ROTC scholarship. However, he was unable to do so because there is no NROTC program at Yale, which he chose for its Chinese Studies major.

Learn by doing no longer is the policy in Carroll, Iowa. The school board fired its bus driver for letting students drive the bus. Children said she offered to let them bring treats on the bus if they didn’t tell their parents.

After the meeting, (parent) Michael Heim said children were given three tries to successfully put the bus in gear. “It was three stalls and you’re out,” he said.

Lesleh Heim said one child became scared and asked to be let off the bus early. The Heims estimate that Rivers let the kids drive about five miles. Michael Heim said he had heard from school administrators that Rivers had already tried to apply for a bus driver position in another district.

She’s accumulated numerous moving violations, so perhaps she thought the kids would be safer drivers.

Via Eduwonk.

Reform K12 has a heart-warming post on his inner-city charter school’s valedictorian, who feared she wouldn’t be able to pay for college.

Our valedictorian was a recent immigrant to the United States when she began as a freshman four years ago. She worked very, very hard to overcome her personal and language obstacles and earned excellent grades through her efforts.

She shared with us that when she was filling out college applications and student loan forms this year she had serious doubts that she and her family would be able to afford college, and she voiced her concern to her father.

He said, “Begin to weave, and God will supply the thread.”

Weave she did, pouring her heart and soul not only into her classwork — she’s graduating with a 4-year GPA just shy of 4.0 — but into the personal essays required for her applications.

She earned a full-scholarship to a top college.

Also check out the photo of a graduate who’s heading for the Air Force.

The valedictorian of Brooklyn’s High School for Legal Studies was denied her diploma because she criticized the school in her graduation speech. Tiffany Schley, who’s heading to Smith on a full scholarship, refuses to apologize, reports the New York Daily News.

Among her gripes: The school has had four principals in four years, overcrowded classes, a shortage of textbooks and other basic materials, unqualified teachers, unstable staffing and uncaring administrators who refused to meet with students to discuss the school’s problems.

“They always want to keep the problems hush-hush, but what goes on in this school is real,” said Tiffany, who was also the editor of the school newspaper, yearbook chairwoman and a member of the student council.

One teacher who attended the graduation said the audience was shocked by the speech.

“The administration was very nervous, but the students were definitely in support of her,” the teacher said.

When Schley came to school yesterday to pick up her diploma with the rest of her classmates, she and her mother were told they had been disrespectful and were escorted out of the building.

If the school has taught its students anything about the law, I’m sure she’ll get her diploma without having to grovel.

The High School for Legal Studies was created when a large, very bad high school was broken into small, specialized schools. While small schools are supposed to engage students and create a sense of community, many are faddish and unaccountable for results, opines Ryan Safer in the New York Post. He doesn’t think much of the new “Peace and Diversity Academy,” one of 70 small schools that will open this fall.

. . . there’s the dingbat problem: The city’s top advocate of small schools is the leftist group New Visions for Public Schools, which is concerned mainly with self-esteem and political activism. The group has gotten fat off of city contracts. It will run 43 of this fall’s new schools.

. . . So many of the city’s small high schools have been exempted from Regents exams, and allowed to judge students based on fuzzy “portfolios” of their work, that there’s no test-score data to review. The best the city can point to: slightly above-average attendance rates.

Academically rigorous schools are “placed in neighborhoods where parents fully expect their children to go to college.” The faddish schools end up in the Bronx and Harlem. For example, New Visions opened the Urban Peace Academy in East Harlem in 1993.

The school says it addresses “issues of peace and justice, wealth and power, racism and oppression and the creation of ourselves and our cultures.” What’s missing there? Hint: Fewer than half of Urban Peace Academy’s class of 2003 met state Regents English standards and none met Regents math standards.

Some of the new schools that will open in a few months don’t have principals or teachers hired yet.

Update: Valedictorian Tiffany Schley will get her diploma, without having to apologize for her graduation speech. The New York Daily News reports:

Before the ceremony, she submitted her speech to an assistant principal, as required, but he rewrote it and gave it back to her on graduation day, she said.

“He typed over it and had me glorifying the school,” she said.

She stuck with her first speech, but couldn’t finish giving it because the assistant principal cut the microphone — before she got to her positive comments about the school.

From Number 2 Pencil’s education news round-up comes this sad story from the Times-Colonist of Victoria, British Columbia:

Confused about how to divide “kilos” of cocaine into ounces for sale, two teens from a Saanich private school turned to their math teacher for help, provincial court heard Monday.

An 18-year-old woman testified that a classmate — when they were both Grade 11 students at St. Margaret’s School for girls — returned from the Thanksgiving holiday with a large quantity of cocaine which she intended to sell.

But the two girls, who cannot be named because they were under age 18 at the time of the alleged incident, were unsure of its value since neither knew how many ounces there are in a kilogram.

“She asked me and I didn’t know. We were in math class so the teacher would know. So I asked,” said the testifying student.

Police, who seized the cocaine from a school locker, said it was in two “bricks” weighing 0.468 and 0.506 kilograms. No word yet on how many ounces that is.

Thomas Sowell comments:

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like “arraigned,” “curried” and “exculpate” meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.

Thirty years ago, I worked as a flunkie for a woman who’d been hired to do an American history curriculum for California Youth Authority (juvenile prison) schools. Or maybe it was an ethnic history curriculum. Her committee of bosses never could make up their minds. I read a searing account of the Middle Passage, written by an escaped slave who’d survived the journey from Africa and later escaped and educated himself. My boss told me to rewrite it in simple words and sentences that CYA students could read. “They took us on the boat. They chained us. It was hot and crowded. Many people died.” And so on. I suggested that students would get more from the passage if they struggled to read it in the original, but my boss told me none of the teen-agers, who’d received a free education from the age of five on, could hope to read language written by the self-educated former slave.

Instead of funding small-scale social programs, Geoffrey Canada decided to change the odds for poor blacks in Harlem Children’s Zone, “an area with about 6,500 children, more than 60 percent of whom live below the poverty line and three-quarters of whom score below grade level on statewide reading and math tests.” In the New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough describes the zone’s network of educational, social and medical services, which reach 88 percent of children in the 24-block core neighborhood. Services are being extended to a 60-block zone.

The organization employs more than 650 people in more than 20 programs; on a recent afternoon, I spent some time walking around Harlem, dropping in on one program after another. At Harlem Gems, a program for 40 prekindergarten students at a public school on 118th Street, Keith, who had just turned 5 and was missing a front tooth, sat at a computer working away at ”Hooked on Phonics,” while Luis, a 19-year-old tutor, gave him one-on-one instruction. A few blocks up Lenox Avenue, at the Employment and Technology Center, 30 teenagers in T-shirts and basketball jerseys, all part of the organization’s new investment club, were gathered around a conference table, listening to an executive from Lehman Brothers explain the difference between the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq. At P.S. 76 on West 121st Street, fifth-grade students in an after-school program were standing in front of their peers, reading aloud the autobiographies they had written that afternoon. And over at Truce, the after-school center for teenagers, a tutor named Carl was helping Trevis, a student in the eighth grade, with a research project for his social studies class, an eight-page paper on the life of Frederick Douglass. In a nearby housing project, a counselor from the Family Support Center was paying a home visit to a woman who had just been granted legal custody of her two grandchildren; in other apartments in the neighborhood, outreach workers from Baby College, a class for new parents, were making home visits of their own, helping teach better parenting techniques. A few blocks away, at the corner of Madison Avenue and 125th Street, construction was under way on the organization’s new headquarters, a six-story, $44 million building that will also house the Promise Academy, a new charter school that Canada is opening in the fall.

Canada’s main focus is improving the educational success of students. After trying to work within the existing public schools and seeing meager results, he’s starting what will be a kindergarten-through-12th-grade charter school with an eight-hour school day, after-school programs and a longer school year. The school will run on the “no excuses” credo.

Here’s Jay Mathews’ story from the Washington Post on low-income D.C. parents with vouchers eagerly signing up their children for private schools.

Jim Miller links to a good news story about Iraqi schools: Teachers earn so much that they’re hot marriage prospects. At one primary school in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, three teachers became engaged this year. The principal credits the raise in pay from $3 a month pre-war to $200 a month now.

Little Green Footballs links to a video on a Swedish Islamic site, Al Qaeda for Kids, which shows children playing Holy Warrior. They seem to be enacting the beheading of Nick Berg.

Last night I saw a performance of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). It’s a Monty Pythonesque farce. The Titus Andronicus scene, a Julia Child parody, made fun of the play’s gore: Titus, his hand chopped off, and his daughter, both hands and her tongue chopped, demonstrate how to behead her rapist and cook him into a pie. It wasn’t funny. Way too close to recent events.