California aims to reflect diversity in classroom studies

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — How do you teach the history of the world in California schools, where nearly two-thirds of students are Latino or Asian, many from newly immigrated families?

Debate about the plan over the past decade has been painstaking and emotional, peppered with testimony from ethnic groups that want something different in the way their people are presented in textbooks and discussed in classrooms.

Other groups simply want more about what their people endured such as the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire a century ago and the Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, when 10,000 Filipinos and 750 Americans died on a forced 60-mile walk to prison.

Citing its own scholars, the foundation also argues for more balanced descriptions of the caste system and the role of women in ancient India in lessons for 6th and 7th graders, some of whom are Hindu Americans.

The proposed framework calls for the subject of Asian "comfort women" to be taught in high school "as an example of institutionalized sexual slavery, and one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century."

Opponents from Japan and California flooded the department with emails and petitions, saying the women were paid prostitutes, and that any force used to recruit them was by rogue soldiers, not the Japanese military.