Are US teachers regularly receiving biased instruction about Israel and the Middle East? That's the claim investigated by Sean Cavanagh in Education Week, where he claims that such taxpayer-supported programs as the National Resource Centers are encouraging "anti- Israel, anti-United States, and decidedly left-leaning biases" in their audiences of middle- and high-school teachers. Teachers attend these NRC sessions in order to gain information about what to teach their students, which is important in our post-9/11 world. Some claim that what teachers learn there is one-sided:
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Capitol Hill lawmakers have shown a hunger for Middle Eastern education programs, for both government workers and average citizens. Three years ago, funding for area studies stood at roughly $21.3 million; by 2003, it had risen to $30 million...
New money has brought new scrutiny. On June 18, a select panel of the House Education and the Workforce Committee heard testimony on the allegations of bias. Some Title VI programs, Mr. ]Stanley] Kurtz told the lawmakers, had benefited from federal interest in Middle Eastern study, only to betray that mission by offering one-sided views of the region.
Critics of U.S. policy, such as the influential academic theorist Edward Said, should be heard, Mr. Kurtz said in an interview, as long as they are balanced with opposing opinions...
...there is little nuance, contend Mr. Kurtz and others, in the political views offered at workshops staged at places like Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Mr. Kurtz, along with Martin Kramer, the editor of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Quarterly, was especially critical of a one-day, April 9 workshop at the Washington campus, titled "Crisis with Iraq."
On his Web site, www.martinkramer.org, Mr. Kramer said the speakers at the workshop—which he noted was held on the same day a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in central Baghdad—offered views exclusively opposed to the U.S. policy in Iraq, or the American-led war in that country.
Some of this controversy is murky, and appears to be a "he-said/she-said" situation. However, I'm automatically suspicious about the comment made by Khalil Jahshan, a Washington consultant on the Middle East, in which he encourages "teachers to avoid playing 'the blame game' in describing why past peace negotiations" in the Mideast have failed.
One could interpret this as a refusal to blame Israel for everything that has gone wrong, which is certainly what some groups have done - but it could also be an instruction to teachers to avoid placing any blame whatsoever on any participants, even on terrorist groups and inhumane actions. I wouldn't want a teacher to present the Holocuast to students in a way that avoids the "blame game," and I think a multicultural, nonjudgmental description of current Mideast events would also be incorrect. We can argue about the "root causes" of suicide bombing, but the question of whether suicide bombing is destructive, immoral, and futile shouldn't be up for discussion.
Posted by kswygert at August 6, 2003 11:11 AM