Santa Ana

 

American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism”.

The root of these lessons stems from California’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC), which passed in 2021 and mandates lessons on the marginalisation of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples, emphasising how they are oppressed by a white oppressor, says Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement for the Jewish Institute of Liberal Values.

“It’s a Trojan horse to institutionalise antisemitism in California schools,” Shufutinsky said.

Meanwhile, more than one million secondary school students in all 50 states are learning about history and the Middle East from the Brown University Choices Programme, which openly accepts funding from Qatar, the wealthy Arab state now harbouring leaders of Hamas. A strong pro-Palestinian bias shines through in Brown’s teaching materials. Israel, according to multiple lessons, is a “Zionist enterprise in Palestine,” an “apartheid state,” a “settler colony,” and “a military occupier”. 

These ideas have profound consequences. A Harvard Harris poll from this month found that 67 percent of people aged 18 to 24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors,” compared to 44 percent of people aged 25 to 34; 24 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 15 percent of those 55 to 64; and 9 percent over 65 years who say the same.

Last month, the British Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said she was horrified to see educational material attempting to “justify” the Hamas atrocities on October 7. The Mail reported: 

In slides that were shared on Mumsnet, pupils at the unamed school were asked if it was “fair for Hamas to attack” the Jewish state, and were then invited to give their opinions on the conflict.

The Mumsnet user who first shared the material  said their child was shown 11 slides on Israel taking land and Palestinian suffering. In posts seen by MailOnline, the parent claimed the material built up a very “one-sided” picture of the conflict. “By contrast, there is one line on the Holocaust and two lines on the October 7 attacks,” they added…”To me, this is inviting students to justify terrorism”.

Last summer, Kebede said at a Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism conference that strikes were about “taking back control of an education system from a brutally racist state… It is much more than about the issue of pay, it is about reorganising society, where we are free from racism and free from oppression”. Kebede has also  previously compared private schools to “apartheid”, accused ministers of “whitewashing” and “removing socialist ideas from the classroom,” and declared that the British education is “fundamentally and institutionally racist”.

As January spills his secrets into the wind,

is there need to brace against him?

.

To simply feel this moment amid the breeze,

how might that be..?

.

With love,

The Universe x