[hr-education] Lesson plans on September 11

Dear list-serve members,

The article below was published on the front page of Saturday's edition of 
the New York Times.  I think that it would be valuable for some of us in 
the HRE field to respond with letters to the editor.

Megan Powers
Program Associate, Human Rights Education
Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights
--------------------------


August 31, 2002

Lesson Plans for Sept. 11 Offer a Study in Discord
By KATE ZERNIKE

The anniversary of Sept. 11 has set off the latest skirmish in the classroom
culture wars.

On one side are school districts, universities and organizations across the
country that have produced lesson plans for the day that try to teach
everything from what snacks to eat for mental health to the traditions of
Islam.

On the other side are those, mostly conservatives, who say these plans spend
too much time talking about feelings and not enough time teaching history
and civics - if they teach anything at all. They say the lessons are too
focused on teaching tolerance and are unwilling to cast judgment or assign
blame. In bending over backward to help students understand the ideology
behind the attacks, they say, educators have gone so far as to be
unpatriotic.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union,
came under so much fire for a suggested lesson plan on tolerance that it has
removed the material from its Web site. Yesterday, a Washington research
group released curriculum written largely by conservatives, including
William J. Bennett and Lynne Cheney, to counter what it called "the
dangerous idea of moral equivalence" and "the usual pap about diversity" in
other lesson plans.

"If the enemies of open, democratic societies had used force to impose this
historical and civic ignorance upon us and our children, we would consider
it an act of war," reads one essay in the collection, by the Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation. The foundation's materials advise talking to students
about history and civics, as well as "President Bush's exemplary conduct"
after Sept. 11, and having them read Ronald Reagan's statement to the nation
after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger as a tribute to American
values.

The teachers' union and other groups whose lesson plans have come under
attack say their curriculums were a response to requests from teachers and
parents who say their children are still suffering emotionally from the
attacks.

"For some kids, school may be the only place they have where they can find a
listening ear," said Jerald Newberry, director of the Health Information
Network for the union, which produced the lesson plans.

The criticism to the lessons on tolerance, Mr. Newberry said, is thinly
veiled bigotry. "If you boil down the concerns of the opposition, what I
would call the far right, ultimately it boils down to is: `I am not
comfortable with my child being in school with someone who's different. I
want to keep my child surrounded by people who are identical to me. The
world is getting too diverse, and I'm scared.' "

The anniversary looms over the opening days of school, and almost everyone
agrees that teachers have to address it somehow - though the prominent
conservative Phyllis Schlafly suggested in an article in The Washington
Times this month that they should simply stick to subjects like math and
English.

Almost everyone has a lesson plan devoted to that day - for-profit Web
sites, the Families and Work Institute, the Anti-Defamation League.

Most emphasize students' emotional responses, breaking down the lesson plans
by grade level and age.

The curriculum developed for the New York City public schools uses "Feeling
Flower Faces" to help students identify a range of emotions.

Among what Mr. Newberry called "100 gentle lessons" in the N.E.A. curriculum
is one where middle school students make color wheels to relate color to how
they feel. A tolerance lesson suggests talking to high school students about
their definition of "terrorist." How many times in defining it, the
curriculum asks, do the terms "Muslim" and "Middle East" come up, and how
does that compare with the characterization of Japanese-Americans who, as
the students learn, were sent to internment camps in World War II?

The N.E.A. Web site also included a link that urged teachers to avoid
blaming Muslims for the attacks. Some conservatives mocked this as excessive
political correctness; the union said they had taken quotes out of context.
In the ensuing controversy, the competing union, the American Federation of
Teachers, issued a statement saying that anything that seemed to blame
America was "wrong." (The group added, however, that it did not think the
N.E.A. was unpatriotic.)

In all, critics say, the proposed discussion of the anniversary takes
schools too far from their traditional business.

"Psychotherapy crowds out the content," said Chester E. Finn Jr., the
president of the Fordham Foundation. "Nobody's against comforting and
reassuring, but good grief - does the school's obligation end at comfort?"

What history is included in the curriculum, the critics say, has too much
emphasis on assessing the United States' faults. Some Web sites, for
instance, encourage teachers to discuss with high school students the
nation's role in establishing Israel, and how Muslims might view that.

"When you're talking about America throwing its weight around, supporting
the Israelis, these are the things my teachers don't want to focus on," said
John Pyne, the social studies supervisor for schools in West Milford, N.J.
"They don't want to focus on the psychobabble thing. It's not like being a
superpatriot, it's a question of what these people did was absolutely
wrong."

Among the lessons that have been criticized is a story called "My Name is
Osama" on the Web site of the National Council for the Social Studies. It is
a fictional tale of an Iraqi boy taunted by his peers after the attacks.
Critics admit the story is touching, but say it misdirects attention.

"Instead of looking at what happened on that day, they're looking at what
might happen as a result of our reaction to that day," said Mary Beth Klee,
the founder of Crossroads Academy, a back-to-basics school in New Hampshire.
"Discrimination is always a concern, but what we learned on Sept. 11 was not
that Americans discriminate against Arabs."

The Fordham Foundation collection accuses other lesson plans of unfairly
raising doubts about the United States.

"A careful, complete reading of our nation's history shows that, while we
have surely had our failings, on the whole America's record is one of
promoting peace and justice at home and abroad," Mr. Bennett, the former
education secretary, wrote. "Teachers must be willing to say that there are
moral absolutes."

But those who wrote the plans say that ignores the reality of teaching young
children.

"Especially with younger kids, there's a risk of them generalizing that
anger to all people of color," said Stephen Brock, a professor of school
psychology at California State University at Sacramento. Professor Brock
helped write a curriculum put out by the National Association of School
Psychologists that the Fordham Foundation criticized for its
"nonjudgmentalism."

"It has nothing to do with patriotism," Mr. Brock said. "It has to do with
helping kids cope with and deal with a horrific event in a way that's
healthy. I don't think it would be productive to get kids riled up and
hateful."

Rona Novick, the clinical director of the School Mental Health Alliance, who
helped write the curriculum for the New York City schools, defended the
lessons for their nuances.

"How do you teach people that racism and killing people based on their
outsides is evil and not face the history of evil in this country where
African-Americans were routinely mistreated, belittled and hung?" Ms. Novick
asked. "Where do you draw the line?"

The unwillingness to choose sides reflects how much debate over what to
teach has changed.

Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of educational studies at the University of
Michigan, noted that as the nation approached World War II, the N.E.A.
produced a book starkly critical of those who would become the United
States' enemies, calling them "ruthless men of force who care nothing for
civil liberties and who mock all appeals to humanity."

Now, Professor Mirel said, "there's a great deal of reticence among teachers
to make a value judgment, to adopt a stance they feel would be perceived as
arrogant or absolute."

"The irony is," he said, "what the Islamic terrorists accuse us of is
arrogance, yet here's a country that is so reticent to say our form of
government is better than the kinds of autocratic, intolerant governments
that they support."


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company




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