A Russian publishing company has suspended the sale of a
social studies textbook that prompted an outcry with its message that
people with developmental disabilities are neither individuals nor
citizens.
The Moscow-based Drofa publishing house will submit
the textbook for "additional expert analysis," and would be "ready
to recall" the book and offer an alternative manual if the original text
fails to secure experts' approval, the company's chief editor Ruslan
Gagkuyev said in a statement on the publishers' website Thursday.
The eighth-grade textbook provoked outrage after
a Moscow-based literary critic, Anna Narinskaya, said she heard her son
reading out from the book and posted scans of its pages on Facebook
social network.
"Imagine a person who suffers from a serious psychological
disorder since early childhood," the textbook reads. "He is incapable
of studying, working, creating a family, of anything that forms
the spiritual world of an individual. In other words, he is not
an individual."
The textbook analyzes the concept of a "citizen," saying
that only those who are individuals — as previously defined — qualify as
citizens.
The book — co-edited by Drofa's former chief of history
and social sciences department, Tatyana Nikitina, and a doctor
of education and laureate of a presidential award, Anatoly Nikitin — is
included on the Education and Science Ministry's list of recommended
school manuals, according to an order published on the ministry's
website.
The textbook had "passed all the necessary expert reviews,
and having received positive evaluations, was included in the federal
list of [school] manuals," Gagkuyev said in his statement.
Copies of this textbook for Moscow schools have been paid for out of the state budget, Izvestia daily reported Wednesday.
Russian activists published a petition on the Change.org
website, urging the Education and Science Ministry to recall
the textbook — which they compared to the writings of "Nazi
psychiatrist" Alfred Hoche, who called for the killing of mentally ill
persons, deeming them "ballast existences."
The petition seeks 1,500 signatures, and by Friday morning, it had gathered more than 1,000.
One of the petition's authors, Yelena Klochko, who sits
on Russia's Civic Chamber and on the government's advisory panel
on social issues, said the textbook "goes against common sense, against
humanity, against the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities," Gazeta.ru reported Wednesday.
Head of the Center for Autism Problems, Yekaterina Men, denounced the textbook's assertions as "fascist," the report said.
"Any ideas claiming there is a group of people that is worse
than another group of people are fascist," she said, Gazeta.ru
reported. "And if we are talking about people, it does not matter what
disabilities they might have; this cannot be grounds for somebody
to decide whether they are individuals, whether they can study, work,
have rights. Because everyone has human rights."
Besides denying people with developmental disabilities their
individuality and citizens' rights, the textbook also offers Russian
schoolchildren wisdom on gender issues, claiming a "real man" must be
intelligent and strong, while a "real woman" must be pretty.
"A man, even if he is still attending school, wants to be
a real man — intelligent and strong," the passage reads. "A girl, even
if she is still very young in age, can already guess that a real woman
is pretty, elegant, possessed of a supple, athletic walk and and
a confident glance."
Source : The Moscow Times , 25th Sep 2015
