"Schools Growing Harsher In Scrutiny of Columbus"
 
by Sam Dillon
 
In The New York Times (October 12, 1992 Vol CXLII No. 49,117)
 
Even at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, where the
choir still sings the Italian national anthem at gatherings, the
Great Navigator is under revisionist siege.
     Though Columbus's bust still gazes proudly from a school
pedestal, in its classrooms he is a tarnished figure who
blundered into the New World and made a hash of its exploration. 
Compared with that at many schools, though, the treatment is
fairly generous.
     On the 500th anniversary of his landing in the New World,
students across the nation are learning everything from
skepticism to contempt for the explorer's exploits.  At a
Brooklyn high school last week, a 17-year-old debater pilloried
Columbus as a pitiful fraud who cheated his sailors and lied
about his discoveries.
 
A MOCK TRIAL
     Fourth-grade students at a private school in Greenwich
Village rehearsed a play mocking Columbus as a bewildered fool
obsessed by gold. In Scarsdale, N.Y., a jury of seventh-grade
students voted 4-1 to declare Columbus a villain after a mock
trial.
     One history book popular this year in some area high schools
portrays Columbus as a Renaissance Darth Vader who ushered in
five centuries of imperialism by enslaving, raping, and
butchering the native Caribs who greeted his 1492 voyage.
     "With Columbus, revisionism has carried the day," said
Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a New
York-based group that reviews educational curricula.  "Columbus
has undergone what is perhaps the most dramatic reworking of any
historical figure in memory."
     The assault on Columbus began in the 1970's, Mr. Sewall
said, with new scholarship partly motivated by mounting interest
in multicultural thinking.  The debate both inside and outside
schools has accelerated int he years leading up to the
quincentenary; on Friday, a major revisionist Columbus film,
"1492: Conquest of Paradise," opened in New York.
     Today, all of America's leading high school history texts
give the explorer's many failings equal billing with his
accomplishments, Mr. Sewall said.
     The quintencentury attacks have ignited a reaction from some
indigent Columbian loyalist.  One of the most vocal is William E.
Simon, the former Treasury Secretary, who is scheduled to deliver
a speech today at Adelphi University in Queens.  The speech is
billed as a counter to the "Columbus bashing in the news today."
     "The arrival of this glorious anniversary in the greatest
democracy in the history of the world finds Columbus under siege
and America divided," Mr. Simon said in an advance text of the
speech.
     According to the revisionists, Columbus "was a villain, a
kind of seagoing Genghis Khan," Mr. Simon said in the speech. 
But "Columbus was above all a man of deep faith....He changed the
fate of the world forever.  And he changed it for the better."
     Adelphi's president, Peter Diamondopoulos, who invited Mr.
Simon to deliver the address, said that Columbus remains "the
hero of all heroes," despite his failings.
     The loyalists appear to be losing ground, however.  Tonya
Frichner, an Onandaga Indian lawyer who addressed the 750
elementary and high school students Friday at Aaron Davis Hall in
Harlem about Columbus's often brutal treatment of Indians, said
she had been encouraged by the acceptance she found for her
critical views during the months of lecturing.
     "There's still much to be done, but people have come around-
-more than I had hoped," Ms. Fichner said in an interview.
     Textbooks have played an important role in the changing
perceptions.  Daniel Boorstin's 1986 "History of the United
States"--one of the more traditional of the mass market high
school texts, Mr. Sewall said--refers to Columbus as a "true
leader," but also notes that Native Americans suffered after
Columbus's landfall.
 
ATROCITIES RECOUNTED
     "For some it meant the end of their Native American
civilization," the book says.  "For some it meant slavery.  For
nearly all of them Europeans brought shock, disease and change."
     At the other end of the spectrum is "Columbus: His
enterprise--Exploding the Myth," by Hans koning, a Dutch-born
novelist.  The book, which has been assigned to students at
several schools in the New York region, calls Columbus's first
Atlantic crossing a "drama of the murderer coming even closer to
his victims."
     Columbus and his men seized Caribbean women as "sex slaves,"
sent attack dogs to maul naked Indians, and disemboweled other
natives who resisted conquest, the book says.  During Columbus's
second voyage, the book reports, Columbus rounded up 1,500 Arawak
Indians and shipped 500 to Spain, where 300 were sold into
slavery.  The other 200 died along the way, according to the
book, which is published by the Monthly Review Press.
     Columbus's men chopped off the hands of thousands of other
natives who fell behind in the forced production of gold, and
many Arawaks reacted by ingesting Cassava poison in a series of
mass suicides, the book says.
     The Koning book was assigned to students participating in
the Native America Education Program, a federally financed agency
that offers supplementary classes to American Indians attending
the city's public schools.
 
'DAYS OF MOURNING'
     Stephanie Betancourt, a Seneca Indian who is coordinator of
the program said: "For Native Americans, every Columbus Day is
like salt in our wounds.  These are days of mourning."
     The Koning text was also required reading at Polytechnic
Preparatory Country Day School in the Bay Ridge section of
Brooklyn.  Teachers, hoping to force students into developing
their critical skills by analyzing a controversial text, urged
students to read the book with a skeptical eye.  But its lurid
passages provided seniors with plenty of ammunition for anti-
Columbus barrages during a debate on Friday.
     "Columbus the great navigator wanted to go to India, landed
near Cuba and mistook it for Japan," jeered Larksham Guttikonda,
a 17-year-old senior.  Later Stephanie Clare, the captain of the
school's debate team, assumed Columbus's ticklish defense to the
hoots of a rowdy crowd.
     "No one is saying that Columbus did not commit atrocities,"
Miss Clare struck back gamely.  "It might be frightening, but he
was an example of everything that is the American ideal.  He was
an adventurer, he was an explorer, he was a breaker of new
ground."
 
'1992 MORAL JUDGEMENT'
     After the debate Miss Clare said, "We shouldn't be putting
our 1992 moral judgements on Columbus.  He should be taught as a
great man who committed atrocities.
     At the Middle School in Scarsdale, a retelling of those
atrocities tipped the scales against Columbus during a "teach-in"
on Columbus last week.  Some students argued that Columbus had
shown great courage in his explorations, said Len Tallevi, the
head of the school's social studies department.  But after
"students brought out that some Indians were hanged and burned
alive," a seventh-grade jury convicted the explorer as a villain,
Mr Tallevi said.
     At the privately run Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich
Village, 9-year-old Carlos Heim played Columbus in a class skit
last week written by a parent.  "We need gold!" Carlos shouted
during a rehearsal.  "Find us more gold!  I have claimed this
land for the profit and glory of Spain!"
     Other fourth-grade actors, playing Indians, shouted back at
Columbus: "We already had languages, ideas and religions.  We did
not ask for new ones."
     Despite the revisionist wave, Columbus heroism remains a
central theme in some schools, and students like 11-year-old
Simone Mazyack, who attends Public School 125 in Harlem and is of
Jamaican and Puerto Rican descent, still speak with old-fashioned
admiration of the explorer.
     "If Columbus hadn't made the sail," she said, "there
wouldn't be this many buildings, because the Indians wouldn't
have this much technology and it would still be mostly grass."
     But Simone's sixth-grade teacher, Cathy Connors, urged her
class to consider African contributions to the New World by
having them read from a book, "They Came Before Columbus,"
written by a black scholar, Ivan Van Sertima.  The book argues
that African navigators sailed to the Caribbean before Columbus.
     At Christopher Columbus High School, the re-evaluation of
its namesake has been fueled by increased ethnic diversity in the
student body.  The school got its name at its 1939 inaugural,
when Fiorella H. La Guardia was Mayor and the school's Penham
Parkway was overwhelmingly Italian and Jewish.  Today its 3,604
students are 42 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black, and 10
percent Asian.
     Howard Feldman, assistant principal for social studies, said
that the school's teaching had moved away from a "Eurocentric"
view or its namesake, with increased emphasis on the cultures the
15th-century intruders smashed.
 
DILLON01