To teach others is to create future

And this future can be bright or horrible.
Today in free countries people tend to think the information should be given freely and only commentaries may differ as there is no discussing with facts. It would have been great had it been so. Of course there is no going back to the times when neighboring town was far away and information took ages (and changes) to reach other country. There is also no going back to totally closed countries (North Korea being possibly one exception) where authorities could control all media in such successful way that people even if didn't believe totally in information provided by official media had no way to check which is true (here I remember the joke from communist times about news being certain, probable and other: certain were about death of normal people, probable was the weather forecast...).
Yet being (at least partially) right about availability of information we tend to forget that:
- people are busy, lazy, have to accept easy answers sometimes as are not able to analyze and check everything and finally checking in many places is neither easy nor safe,
- the mine and avalanche of information we receive every day is often impossible to deal with,
- manipulation (information included) is as old as humankind
- propaganda is just as old
- we tend to accept things we are told at school or by parents or by people we trust

There are topics specially prone to manipulation and Middle East politics specially concerning Israel (but not only) belongs to this category. And while many people accept even media coverage (often shown to be untrue) more even will be prone to accept school books texts, won't they?
Check it here:
UK school books wipe Israel of the map

After all we rarely examine school books designed to teach writing for accuracy of their information!
Yes, the freedom of speech means the truth can be abused and social agreement goes that such abuses will be easy to contradict and less dangerous than censorship.  The attitude I generally agree with! Yet we are thinking about grown-ups in free country. In many countries the official truth is the only available even if there is no truth in it. Which in global world means that we should cherish the truth even more and finding abuses of it try to correct it. But that is not so (for many reasons). At the same time if textbooks would try to teach school children officially that Civil War was won by South, Lincoln was not assassinated, Pearl Harbor was caused by - say - Russians or treacherous Americans we would act, wouldn't we? Whatever our admiration for free speech. Yet when school texts try to teach our children or immigrant children in the way to become citizens things that are absolutely untrue and that bring propaganda from their countries of origin we look in other way. Yet they are children, and citizens, and future.
The truth is a delicate thing. And it is hard for itself to defend. We have to stand up for it so our children will have the privilege (as it is privilege and not right) to have freedom of speech, pleasure of discussion about implications of facts were and are (here we may differ, but not when it comes to facts) and still be well educated based on facts and not prejudices and facts created by publishers.

So - let's stand for truth in school textbooks!