Even before they set foot on college campuses, countless young Americans have been exposed to anti-Semitism and anti-Israel propaganda in their primary and secondary educations. A pre-Kindergarten teacher at a Manhattan public school recently designed a poster for her wards explaining how “ethnic identity” explains the variations in the shape of people’s noses. The teacher, Siriana Abboud, has given the public a view of how this lesson might fit into her overall pedagogical approach, as Francesca Block writes:
Abboud, . . . posts regularly on her Instagram account, which has nearly 7,000 followers, about her education mission statement. . . . In it, she shares “collective action guides” on how to “speak with your child about Palestine” and how to “decolonize your teaching.” . . . On October 9, Abboud wrote: “we stand with those still tearing down border walls,” and “we show solidarity with those still fighting to free their stolen land.” Earlier, she had made her philosophy for educating kids clear: “Our work of decolonizing education begins in preschool. It is very much already a political practice.”
And the problem is more widespread than one deranged teacher:
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 marginalization of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples,
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 Program, which openly accepts funding from Qatar, the wealthy Arab state now harboring 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.”
For Jewish parents looking for alternatives, my colleagues at Tikvah have just begun the Emet Classical Academy.
Read more on Free Press: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism