“God’s Servants” started making censor corrections in high school education program

The Ministry of Science and Education returned to the practice of deleting pages, telling about some unwanted facts from the current school textbooks, which was quite common-spread during the rule of Stalin and Khrushchev. This time it was made to please the representatives of new-religious trends.

An ordinary directive of the Ministry of Education, the editorial board of GOROZHANIN newspaper managed to get, turned out to be a significant event in the history of Independent Ukraine. Even the eldest teachers in our country hardly remember times when the pages in the textbooks were torn out or covered with white paper for the last time, as this was long, long ago, during the periods of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s ruling the USSR. One could find pieces of paper covering information either about Marshal Tito from Yugoslavia who “had betrayed the only right way”, Stalin himself or Voroshilov, who had just “supported them”. 
Now we found the directive№ 1/9-623, given by the Ministry of Education on the September, 24, 2008 and signed by Polyansky, the deputy minister. It tells the local departments for education-related issues to “make sure that the teachers of high schools remove the right part of page 99 of “Healthcare” textbook for the eighth-formers (written by Boychenko, Vasilashko, Koval) as it contents wrong information”. Doesn’t it remind of these old times?
Page ninety nine of this very textbook contains the paragraph dedicated to “Social Hazards”, which teaches the children how not to become a victim of a destructive cult. The Ministry of Education considers that Jehovah Witnesses religious organization was included there by mistake and thus this paragraph should be removed.
This information is really debatable. Many states consider this organization’s activity suspiciously and try to restrict its activity, but, on the other hand, official Ukrainian religion studies, which is represented by professor Kolodny, who is notorious for being a “cult advocate”, doesn’t consider Jehovah Witnesses to be a cult. 
But the fact that the Ministry of Education is editing the book, which has already been approved, just according to some religious organization’s freak of mind and pays no attention to the debatableness of this question, is a really alarming precedent.
“Gorozhanin” has also got two more interesting documents – a letter, Jehovah Witnesses had sent to the Ministry of Education. It was telling about their insulted religious concerns. Then, there was the answer of the Ministry, with their begging the “Witnesses” a pardon and telling them what they have done “to solve this problem”.
There are only two variants of explaining this situation which seem to be more or less logical. First, we might suppose that the authors, who had written the textbook and who were meant to be well-informed and qualified people, turned out to be not competent in their subject and the whole blown-up staff of the Ministry of Education is too illiterate to find at least one to read the textbook and find all the mistakes before approving it. Or nowadays the only proper organization to distinguish what’s right and what’s wrong in Ukrainian textbooks is the heading corporation of Jehovah Witnesses in Brooklyn, USA.
But after all, all these suggestions are just theoretical ones. As for me, I would like to propose quite a practical suggestion: as making changes in the school educational program is such an easy thing, I suggest make changes not only in “Healthcare” textbook. As for me, I find some chapters in History, Russian and Chemistry textbooks very offensive. So, I am very eager to find out whom in Ministry of Education I should appeal to and how much I should pay so that the pages with these chapters could be torn out from the textbooks because of “mistaken information”.

Yan Shchekaturov                                                                                                                                          (o 6)