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August 04, 2004Changing My CurriculumBy Jawad Ali
“What do you mean you have not read Stupid White Men? How did they let you graduate from college?” I heard a silver haired woman jokingly put this question to a young man eating cheese and crackers at a Michael Moore event a few weeks ago. I did not want to face the fact that I have not read that book either, so I ducked out towards the nacho chips. Normally I love to question the value of other people’s education and recommend curriculum changes for those who are foolish enough to disagree with me. I learned this valuable trick from my conservative and neo-liberal heroes. Thomas Friedman recently wrote a column about the horrible killing of innocent white people in Saudi Arabia. He recommended a curriculum change in Saudi school books as a solution. Mr. Friedman has become the butt of everyone’s jokes lately. I don’t want to pick on him while he is down, but even I was startled by this sudden turn of logic. I was sure that he was setting us up for an argument to change the curriculum at the Yale MBA program. I felt betrayed. Saudi Curriculum There really isn’t a chapter on beheadings in the Saudi fifth grade social studies book. Friedman knows this. His friends at the New York Times have shown him some very credible forged documents that show that the Saudis are desperately trying to acquire the chapter from a defunct school in Niger, but they don’t have it yet. The problem lies with the Saudi elites, and many from their top tier went to school at Oxford and Harvard. The second tier went to places like the Dade County Community College in Florida for its low admissions requirements. Some went to flight school in Florida. New books are needed at all these schools. Friedman is the favorite token Jew of the Saudi regime. We recently slapped the House of Saud across the knuckles for denying tourist visas to Jews. The Saudis were quick to slap us back with a photo of Mr. Friedman reading “My Pet Goat” to Saudi school children at a famous photo opportunity. The Saudi children’s book has a slightly different ending. The last chapter is called Eid al-Adha (insider Muslim joke). Mr. Friedman did not get to read that far. He was quickly whisked away to a secret location before he could get a blank look on his face. The evidence of the bad curriculum is not contained in the curriculum itself. The evidence, according to Mr. Friedman, is in the fact that Saudi children grow up to become killers. You can now see how I got to thinking about the curriculum changes at the Yale MBA program. Like Mr. Friedman, I am too lazy to think about the specifics of the new curriculum, but I will go with Stupid White Men as a good start. I doubt that Mr. Friedman was going to recommend something equally good. Israeli Curriculum A few years ago it was the Palestinian children’s curriculum that became the key talking point of the loony right wingers. They even commissioned a study to show that the rising violence against Israelis can be traced back to the grade school curriculum. This time they studied the curriculum and not the violence, for a change. The results of the study squeezed out their sixteenth minute of fame by grabbing air time on every conceivable talk show. The other side shot back showing that the methods of the study were completely bogus. This party was not given any air time. Who wants to hear from a bunch of whining academics. Let’s face it—if you are not teaching children to memorize Zionist myths then you are teaching them to hate. There is no point in whining about the dirty tricks of the Israeli study. I prefer going on the offensive to show them the absurdity of their argument. Jewish kids are growing up to become baby killers in even larger number. If it is not something in the Koolaid they drink, then it must be something in the fourth grade curriculum. These days the definition of anti-Semitism may be stretched to include all arguments that show the absurdity of anti-Arab arguments. I will have to check on this. The body count of Arab children at the hands of Israelis is hard to deny. Yet there are no calls to change the Zionist curriculum. This stems from two big problems in the Zionist curriculum itself. First one says that these numbers do not count because Arabs are not really human. We can blame the “land with no people” part of the Zionist mythology for this one. The second one says that there is a sinister plot to make Jews look bad behind every Arab ambulance or elementary school that gets bombed by Israel. The related right wing talking point says that Arab moms don’t really love their children like normal humans do. This brings us back to the first talking point which states that Arabs are not really human to begin with. Now if we could expunge these two talking points from everyone’s curriculum we would be half way toward everlasting peace in the Middle East. Peace in the Middle East is a bad thing. It only delays the second coming of Christ. This is a talking point of the Christian right, but the mainstream Jewish establishment is lined up solidly behind it. So make that three talking points that we have to expunge from the curriculum. I am getting ready to subpoena the Brooklyn school district to find out why so many Jewish kids from good families grow up to become sadistic goons and settlers in the West Bank. I have completely my own study to document all the violence that Palestinian children suffer at the hands of the Israelis on their way to school. So far I have only completed the conclusions of the study. The actual field work will be done once grant money becomes available. Scholarship is whatever you can buy with cash money these days. Pakistani Curriculum President Musharraf of Pakistan has been promoted to a junior Jedi in the “war on terra ™.” He has obliged by promptly declaring a war on curriculum. Pakistani school children are now learning good things about Indian military adventures. Like everything else in his life, Musharraf is a late comer to the curriculum wars. It was not too long ago that everything in the subcontinent was blamed on the lack of education. This really meant the lack of a proper Anglo Saxon education. Only the British and their minions had a “proper” education back then. “Fundamentalism is caused by illiteracy,” cried Pakistan’s decadent elite and declared a war on illiteracy. Then they noticed a few disturbing facts.
So the war on illiteracy gave up on opening schools and shifted gears to closing the other guy’s schools. Then came the demand that the other guy’s schools teach our books. American Curriculum The Green Party has excused itself from the presidential elections. The race has now become a pissing contest between two guys about who can send more troops to destroy Iraq. Both guys are graduates of the Yale curriculum. The neocon architects of the Iraq disaster know next to nothing about the Middle East. They are very proud of this, and they have a famous disdain for anyone who does know something about the region. They have now set things in motion, not to change the curriculum at Yale but to bring other university programs down to President Bush’s level of understanding and patriotism. Bills are pending in Congress that would deny funding to American Universities that do not teach a sufficiently right wing and “patriotic” curriculum. Curriculum wars One of the first things that most children learn in school is that most formal education is a fraud. What children are learning (and not learning) everywhere is a big scandal. Yet the curriculum wars are not about improving schools all over the world. They are about forcing one party’s myths as the official dogma. Regime change starts with whatever elementary school that promoted Mr. Friedman out of fifth grade. Jawad Ali is Co-founder and Executive Editor of Muslim WakeUp!
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