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boku-no-kokoro-no-sekai-tizu

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the World History Textbook Committee

Because some of my friends asked me what does the World History Textbook Committee do, I will write about it here.

Our committee basically correct a lot of history textbook from all over the world. Because in Asia Pacific University, there are bunch of people from other countries, we ask them to send to Japan, or bring it with to Japan when they return to their mother country. Then, with the help from those donators, we translate them into Japanese and English. Now, you are able to compare the textbooks even you cannot read the mother language. What is the benefit of being able to compare textbooks???

Well, first of all, you can see the diversity and variety of textbooks. Some textbooks are used for 10 yrs, that means the textbook will not be owned by one individual but owned by school. Some are very thick and full-colored.
You also are able to see the difference of discription in the textbooks. What you learnt is not necessarily what people in other countries would learn. Because each countries have different vew point to see the history, there will be different in its discription. Or, there will be the difference of writing amount for one event. It again depends on how the country was involved or how the country recognize it as important issue.
Now, if you know that there are a lot of differences between textbooks, what you can got from this knowledge??? Well, you have to think about what roles the textbooks carry. You have to consider the significant educational roles of textbooks.
Because it is the first academic book that you have and is the one teachers use, you will more likely to believe every discription and every stories on it. You might think that's everything happened in the world. If you learned WW2 from Japanese perspective, you might able to find many writing about atomic bomb. However, if you learned the same event but from different perspective, let's say China or Korea (those damaged countries by Japanese troops), there might be more discription about Japanese cruelty and you will find some emotional words.

Our mission is to create mutural understanding between people across the borders by giving the neutral resources which discribe one of the causes for creating differences. Because textbooks could be very viased and political, and the education is one of the key items to create your value structure, it will affect those reader of the textbook. This is what we considered most.

We, however, will only exhibit the textbooks and translations, and features of textbooks. We will not show any one-side idea for textbook as some organizaitons do. We have to be very newtral so that visitors can judge based on their culture. Having one particular idea wont make people think and it will be just thought control over the textbook issue. We do have idea, but still we need to study more and more since we also judge things based on what we learnt. APU offers great opprtunity in this point, because we have a lot of people from a lot of places who have different background.

So, I think you can understnad somehow what I want to do in Japan Hopefully... Now its time for me to work on the paper ...
by canadian_dreaming | 2005-03-11 12:00 | 世界の歴史教科書博覧会実行委員
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