A Failed Education

pmishra2 #153 What does your post have to do with the point I made about your pakistan obsession??

This is the second time that I have caught you straying from the subject being discussed (first time you had started pointing to His Excellency`s name rather than face up to your problem). You are slipping back. You cant give up now, man!! In your last post, at least you made an effort to shake out of your obsession with disparaging pakistan when you cut and paste that article about israel. Keep trying and maybe you will start to peep about something other than about how bad pakistan is.

On the other hand, if you truly are incapable of saying anyting intelligent, then at least stick to cutting and pasting things from the internet. For example, just as you cut and paste that article on israel, you could cut and paste articles on things like space flight, the wonderful world of science. Maybe you could get bold and even post something from a porno site. This way people will think you are capable of thinking beyond your obsession with pakistan.

HisExcellency #154 You have to admit that explanation is a bit of a stretch. In any case, wait till you get married to this girl and she catches you spending all this time on chowk. You will be called other things (something about ``wasting time chatting with strangers`` for example), but not Your Excellency or Your Majesty or anything like that. (I talk from personal experience, of course).

tahmed, his excellency,

You fellas are wasting your time...

hate mongers like p-mishra, friend, etc are a dime a dozen.

#152 tahmed32

Clearly you have missed your vocation as a security aide at a school for drop-outs or some kind of prison guard. Why not consider a career change in that direction?

You seem to be under the illusion that Chowk is some kind of personal fiefdom that belongs only to you. It is with regret I have to inform you that, within some constraints, this is a forum for free expression. So get real....

#150 by tahmed32

The story behind my title is long and has something to do with the girl I am engaged to. Actually she gave me this title since I used to tease her with titles like ``Your Majesty``. There is nothing more to it actually.

#152 by tahmed32

++
Congratulations. I shall be your one man support group as you try to break free from whatever they did to your brain when you were going to school in india. pmishra2 ki jai howay!!
++

Make it a two-man support group. I can`t believe my eyes also. For a change, pmishra2 is arguing his point-of-view objectively, instead of resorting to negative stereotypes. Ajit [my favorite Bollywood villain] would probably agree that pmishra2 is a ``smaaart boy``.

pmishra2 #151 Very good. I am glad to see you are making an effort to break your obsession with denigrating pakistan. This must be the first chowk post ever you have written that has nothing to do with pakistan. Admittedly you just cut and paste an article on Israel, but that is a giant first step forward. Congratulations. I shall be your one man support group as you try to break free from whatever they did to your brain when you were going to school in india. pmishra2 ki jai howay!!

From the NYTimes, Aug 14, 1999

In Israel, New Grade School Texts for History Replace Myths With Facts

---

By ETHAN BRONNER

ERUSALEM -- Few ideas are as deeply ingrained in Israeli culture as the one summed up by the Hebrew phrase, ``me`atim mul rabim,`` or ``the few against the many.`` Schoolchildren have long been taught that the Jews have always been surrounded by enemies and that their victory over five Arab states in the 1948 War of Independence was a near miracle of David-and-Goliath proportions.

But the start of this school year marks a quiet revolution in the teaching of Israeli history to most Israeli pupils. New, officially approved textbooks make plain that many of the most common Israeli beliefs are as much myth as fact.

The new books say, for example, that it was the Israelis who had the military edge in the War of Independence. They say that many Palestinians left their land not -- as has traditionally been taught -- because they smugly expected the Arab states to sweep back in victoriously but because they were afraid and, in some cases, expelled by Israeli soldiers.

The books freely use the term ``Palestinian`` to refer to a people and a nationalist movement, unheard of in the previous texts. They refer to the Arabic name for the 1948 war -- the Naqba, or catastrophe -- and they ask the pupils to put themselves in the Arabs` shoes and consider how they would have felt about Zionism.

Finally, the books no longer separate Jewish and Israeli history from events around the world but weave them into a single tapestry.

``Only 10 years ago much of this was taboo,`` reflected Eyal Naveh, a history professor at Tel Aviv University and the author of one of the new ninth-grade textbooks on the 20th century. ``We were not mature enough to look at these controversial problems. Now we can deal with this the way Americans deal with the Indians and black enslavement. We are getting rid of certain myths.``

The ``new history`` approach that Naveh and other new textbook authors are using in their descriptions of the Israeli-Arab conflict is 10 or 15 years old. It has gained a growing following among academic scholars and then with a somewhat larger public after the 1993 Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

But while the publication of such revisionism by scholars is one thing, the inclusion of their perspective in school books is clearly something else. In all states, but especially new ones, school is typically viewed as a place not only to learn but to be imbued with civic and patriotic spirit.

The fact that these new books are currently being assigned and bought without advance publicity about the changes says something about Israel`s sense of its own maturity. But it seems nonetheless likely that when, in the coming months, the books` contents become known, controversy will ensue.




``Why not just translate the Palestinian books for our children and be done with it?`` fumed Aharon Megged, a novelist and outspoken critic of the new history, when he was read a passage from a new textbook. ``This is an act of moral suicide that deprives our children of everything that makes people proud of Israel.``

The passage to which Megged was reacting was from Naveh`s book, on the War of Independence:

``On nearly every front and in nearly every battle, the Jewish side had the advantage over the Arabs in terms of planning, organization, operation of equipment and also in the number of trained fighters who participated in the battle.``

The approach of earlier textbooks is typified by the following from a 1984 Education Ministry book on the years 1939 to 1949: ``The numerical standoff between the two sides in the conflict was horrifyingly unbalanced. The Jewish community numbered 650,000. The Arab states together came to 40 million. The chances of success were doubtful and the Jewish community had to draft every possible fighter for the defense of the community.``

This shift in perspective is common to the work of the new historians who are relying on newly opened state archives and the emotional distance of a young generation.

Instead of portraying the early Zionists as pure, peace-loving pioneers who fell victim to Arab hatred, the new historians focus on the early leaders` machinations to build an iron-walled Jewish state regardless of the consequences for non-Jews living here.

The controversy that this narrative has generated mirrors the wider dispute in Israel between those who favor more concessions to the Arabs and those who fear that such concessions place Israel`s legitimacy and its very existence at risk.

But the arrival of the new textbooks also mirrors the growing acceptance of some new history by Israelis. Last year, when the country marked its 50th birthday, a television series known as Tkuma, or rebirth, offered a more complex and less varnished version of Israeli history than had been typically shown. And a new military history book of Israel by a group of mainstream military historians has just been published that explodes several key myths about Israeli military feats.

Michael Yaron, who is in charge of the history curriculum at the Ministry of Education, says the issue is one of historical accuracy; he calls the changes salutary. He took up his post five years ago, during the liberal administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and quietly continued his work after Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative, was elected in 1996, finishing approval of the new books just as Ehud Barak, who is in Rabin`s mold, was elected in the spring.


``We are beginning a new era in history teaching where, for the first time in Israeli textbooks, the picture is not black and white,`` Yaron said. ``That was an important goal of mine when I came, to make sure the Palestinian perspective was included.

``My second goal was to end the practice of separately teaching Jewish and Israeli history on the one hand and world history on the other. It was absurd. We used to spend one year teaching the Holocaust and the next teaching World War II. Now we will teach Jewish history in the larger context of other events. This doesn`t minimize Zionism. It puts it in context.``

Yaron`s department began integrating Jewish and world history for middle school in its sixth grade textbooks several years ago and is finishing this project with the new ninth grade books that have just been printed. Since ninth grade history class is devoted to the 20th century, when Israel was formed, this is the year when controversy may be expected.

Israel has a number of state-approved school systems and the new books will only be used in the mainstream secular system that serves about 60 percent of the population. The religious state system and the strictly-observant systems that operate with state approval and funds will not use the new books, meaning that the divisions between the various sectors may now be aggravated further.

There are three new competing ninth-grade history books for the secular system, one from the ministry`s own publishing division and two produced privately with ministry approval. All three take a much broader, more textured approach to Israeli history than textbooks have in the past. New books for the 10th through 12th grades are due out in the coming year and all take the new approach of integrating Jewish history with world history.

One ninth-grade book is ``Passage to the Past`` by Kezia Tabibyan, which not only mentions the 1948 massacre carried out by radical Zionist forces in the village of Deir Yassin, something Ms. Tabibyan says had never been done in a ninth-grade text before, but also engages in a kind of historiography by asking students to reflect on the use of myths in nation-building.

``If I want to educate the citizens of Israel after 2000 they must know that there is another point of view about things like our War of Independence,`` Ms. Tabibyan said. ``They must deal with Deir Yassin. They must know that there was another people that had their life here.``

The ministry book, edited by Danny Jacoby, is in some ways the most radical of the three. Its discussion of why the Palestinians became refugees includes the sentence, ``There were also localities in which the Jewish fighting forces conducted expulsion actions.`` The book also frankly discusses how Jews from North Africa and the Arab world felt mistreated by European Jews when they came here.

Clearly, part of what is driving the change in history texts is the ongoing Middle East peace effort.

The accords between the Israelis and Palestinians call on each side to fight racism and provocation and instruct their populations in coexistence.

Yet one of the issues that has most troubled Israeli commentators is the fact that the Palestinians are still using old Jordanian and Egyptian texts which never mention Israel and often portray Jews as evil and bloodthirsty.

An Israeli group called ``Palestinian Media Watch`` recently published the findings of its study of Palestinian textbooks. In one textbook on Arab history, the group noted, is the sentence, ``The best examples of racism and discrimination in the world are Nazism and Zionism.`` Another book, for sixth graders, says, ``One must be careful around Jews because they are lying traitors.``

Khalil Mahshi, director of international relations at the Palestinian education ministry, said he is troubled by the anti-Semitism that appears in the books used by Palestinians but noted that new books are being written.

``We are not rewriting our school history books,`` he said. ``We are writing them for the first time. It will take a few more years because we are just forming committees to set up the guidelines.``

Asked if the new books would include Israeli perspectives on the dispute, Mahshi begged for indulgence, saying that while the Palestinians want to be treated as equals, their historical development has not been equal to that of the Jews.

``We are attempting to be as objective as possible,`` he said. ``We should be living a new reality, taking a more mature view, but to do that means overcoming pain. To see the Zionist movement as having an equal right to our land as we do is to embark on a personal journey to history which is more complicated than most people realize.

``It took me a long time and even then I am not there. Israelis are changing because they can afford it. They are now so rich and powerful that they can afford to be magnanimous and say, `OK, there are people here we haven`t treated well.` But when you are still dealing with daily difficulties and view them as the fault of the people next door, can you afford to be so magnanimous?``

pmishra2 #147 ``His Excellency`` is indeed a pompous title. However, that has nothing to do with the point I made. I guess they didnt teach you how to pay attention to what you read either.

While we are discussing the flaws in Pakistani textbooks, we might as well discuss textbooks in other countries as well... just to get an objective perspective.

In September 1999, Maureen Meehan filed a special report for Washintgon-Report on Middle East Affairs. In this article, she exposes the racist and anti-Palestinian bias of Israeli textbooks. She bases her report on a study undertaken by Professor Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University. Professor Bar-Tal studied 124 elementary, middle- and high-school textbooks on grammar, Hebrew literature, history, geography and citizenship. After the study he concluded that ``Israeli textbooks present the view that Jews are involved in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refuses to accept and acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel``

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0999/9909019.html

This is the kind of material that Israeli students are learning in their elementary, middle and high schools:

1. Arabs are delegitimized by the use of such labels as ``robbers``,``‘bloodthirsty``, and ``killers``



2. Jews are described as industrious, brave and determined to cope with the difficulties of “improving the country in ways they believe the Arabs are incapable of.”



3. Hebrew-language geography books from the 1950s through 1970s focused on the glory of Israel’s ancient past and how the land was “neglected and destroyed” by the Arabs until the Jews returned from their forced exile and revived it “with the help of the Zionist movement.”



4. Geography textbooks justify the return of the Jews, implying that they care enough about the country to turn the swamps and deserts into blossoming farmland; this effectively delegitimizes the Arab claim to the same land



5. An excerpt from middle-school geography textbook: ``Palestinians were primitive and neglected the country and did not cultivate the land``.



6. Blatant negative stereotyping of Arabs as: “unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic.” Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were “tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored” and “they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.”



7. Hebrew- as well as Arabic-language textbooks used in elementary and junior high schools contain very few references either to Arabs or to Arab-Jewish relations. Major historical events hardly get a mention either.



8. Textbooks used by the nearly one million Arab Israelis (one-fifth of Israel’s population) are in Arabic but are written by and issued from the Israeli Ministry of Education, where Palestinians have no influence or input.



9. For the past 15 years, not one new Palestinian academic has been placed in a high position in the ministry. There are no Palestinians involved in preparing the Arabic-language curriculum [and] obviously, there is no such thing as affirmative action in Israel.



10. There are no Arabic-language universities in Israel.



11. No major scholarships have ever been awarded to an Arab; there are no dorms for Arabs and no college-related jobs or financial aid programs. Israelis justify this legal discrimination by the fact that Arabs don`t serve in the army.



12. Discussion of Palestinian national and civil identity is never touched upon.



13. Elementary school textbooks teach children that Israel became a state in 1948 and that the Arabs started a war. They don’t mention what happened to the Arabs—they never mention anything about refugees or Arabs having to leave their towns and homes,”



14. Israeli researcher Adir Cohen sampled 86 children`s books. He counted the following descriptions used to dehumanize Arabs: Murderer was used 21 times; snake, 6 times; dirty, 9 times; vicious animal, 17 times; bloodthirsty, 21 times; warmonger, 17 times; killer, 13 times; believer in myths, 9 times; and a camel’s hump, 2 times.

#145 tahmed32

What is your point exactly? That we are to be subjected to the pompous and ignorant prattling of people who title themselves ``Excellency`` ? And that a sharp response to lies and disinformation is wrong?

#144 by pmishra2

Dear pmishra2, don`t bother lecturing us on hate material. Your own posts are dripping with it. Here is an advice: refrain from using terms like ``rogue-state`` for your neighbors. It just makes you sound like a Rwandan racist. Don`t tell us that you come from a secular, tolerant country. Show us that you belong to a secular, tolerant country.

When I asked questions about Israeli education system, I was looking for an objective analysis like the one AlephNull posted. It`s obvious (from your posts) that you are unfamiliar with concepts of ``objectivity`` and ``analysis``.

tahmed

Well said!

pmishra2: you are like a naked man who points to flaws in the other man`s clothes.

That is, the obsessive need to denigrate pakistan that is evident in posts from you and others (like the half-brain arjun, and with all due respect the doctor sahib rsridhar) on this board speaks for itself about the quality of education you have received in India. While there are a couple of pakistanis of your kind as well on chowk, by and large you dont find this obsessive need to degrade the India and Indians. I guess all well educated indians have better things to do than spend their time hooting at pakistanis. And most pakistanis here have lots of other things to talk about than trying to prove their superiority to indians.

#138 YourXXXX

Heh, heh ! I guess your fantasy got punctured here. From a sectarian scoundrel I am now promoted to being on the ``same page``. Aren`t facts really annoying.

Moving on to your next masterpiece (#141):

[quote]
Do Israeli schools also teach Jewish children about Judaism and superiority of Jewish people from an early age?? Do Jewish textbooks teach kids that Israel belongs to Israelis? Or do they acknowledge the claim of Palestinians to the same land? What do Israeli textbooks say about Muslims and non-Jews?
[end-quote]

I am familiar with these materials. They never emphasize anything like the ``superiority of anyone``. They certainly emphasize that Israel belongs to Israelis (WHo else does it belong to?). They clearly show the arab inhabitants of Israel as rightfully there and practicing their own culture. All three traditions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism are described without preference. You are clearly deeply ignorant of (modern) rabbinical judaism`s notion of ``others`` and how different it is from your own traditions.

Your comments clearly show the darkness in which the pakistani elite lives. Not the fanatics, because all fanatics are the same everywhere. You seriously believe that an open and democratic country like Israel would teach hatred in its elementary schools? Just because the military-ruled rogue state you originate from does??? You are truly deluded. Wow ! This is truly a revelation.

I am teaching my daughter Hindi from a NCERT textbook (Bal Bharati I) used throughout India today. It includes a chapted on Id and its celebration. There are four characters in the book:
Madan, Sushila, Sarla, Selma and Rahim. They play together and go to various activities in their little town.

Those who are aware of their ignorance can improve, but what of those who are unaware of it??? Truly a sad story here.

His excellency...

My History book in Grade 5 (in 1990) written by A K Haye of the Kakul Academy had a chapters on ancient Indian history, Ramayan, Maurayas, Asoka, Kanishka, and later on between the two chapters on Iqbal and Jinnah, there was a chapter on Gandhi who was praised abundantly. The view given was that Gandhi had a view different from Jinnah, yet this didn`t mean that Gandhi was a bad person ... that both had one final goal: peace and prosperity of the people...

It was not until I saw Gandhi the movie that I became aware of the abuse hurling match that Indians and Pakistanis were involved in with respect to their founding fathers who though political rivals always maintained very visible cordiality in public and never raised their voices with each other.

-YLH