Gaza’s health ministry has updated its death toll since the conflict broke out on October 7, to 9,061, including 3,760 children and 2,326 women.
Please, please do not be desensitized to the numbers. Please don’t look away! Palestinians do not even have the privilege look away! Do not stop protesting, do not stop demanding for a ceasefire, do not stop donating esims or money or humanitarian aid, do not stop looking ways for help, do not stop talking about Palestine!
Another protest in Montreal for Palestine, the goal for which is 100 000 participants by the organizers. It will take place on 175 Saint-Catherine Street West, at 2PM on Saturday November 4th.
You stupid motherfuckers will never know what it’s like to live in the U.S. occupation. The fact that this party has no red line for violence against its targets and is willing to excuse any amount of civilian deaths scares the shit out me, whose family and friends scattered across South Korea and Japan. They are the first ones in the line of fire in any violence that U.S. might fucking start. It’s enough for me to ask my friends to withhold their votes. You can’t even cry about Trump or whatever because Biden was literally the vice when Obama the Drone Bomber fucking ramped up demonization of North Korea and Anthony Blinken, Biden’s fucking cabinet member, is the one ramping up the tensions between the South and the North right now. Will you also say this when Blinken inevitably pushes too far and causes a war in my homeland? Will you say that my relatives dying isn’t a reason not to vote blue? You people are sick and sickening.
I’m 33 and American. This myth is so widespread here I didn’t know the truth until I was TWENTY-NINE. I was literally taught something similar IN COLLEGE—that the Puritans were so reactionary in America as a result of what happened to them in England. And this was in a class about the history of witchcraft accusations and the Salem witch trials. Like, we were taught that they were horrible HERE, but the narrative was still that they faced injustice in England.
This wasn’t a stupid teacher, either. She had her first doctorate and was pursuing a second. Basically everything else I learned in that class checks out. The myth just runs THAT DEEP.
I am currently certified to teach Social Studies for grades 4-12, and also to teach freshman level history survey courses. I attended public schools k-12 and a state university for a BA and MIS.
It was, and remains, common for teachers to state that the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution. I was taught this, but was aware that it wasn’t strictly true due to a childhood fixation on John Quincey Adams and Quannah Parker.
People forget that USAmerica has no concept of a national curriculum, or of national curriculum standards.
Lots of states currently adhere to Common Core curriculum, but that is voluntary, and many states with large populations of school-aged children do not.
Additionally, schools that purchase professionally produced curriculum often penalize teachers who try to add nuance to familiar narratives. But, schools that rely on teachers to write their own curriculum, are also relying on the sum total of the teacher/s’ knowledge.
In Texas, where I was educated and worked in public school, the learning standards for all levels of Social Studies instruction mandate a positive presentation of founding documents, the founders, and also of the country’s colonial past as related to the Industrial Revolution and the influence of capitalism on the development of Enlightenment ideas about freedom and self-determined government.
In college courses, it’s common to hear the above ideas in nuanced, if not outrightly negative terms.
But, in most on-level social studies education, a simplified, (often) worshipful version is presented. In AP, IB, or DC courses, a more nuanced approach is given, but access to these courses is limited by school funding cuts, local budget cuts, lack of qualified teaching staff, and lack of demand due to interference by (almost exclusively) republican-backed special interest groups.
I will remind (or inform) you that State Boards of Education, as well as local school boards, in the USA are elected political positions. People rarely take those elections seriously until, if ever, they realize that they’ve been misled about this whole thing by an openly biased system.
If this is of concern to you (and I do think it ought to be), please read the curriculum standards that apply to the schools in your area. State standards are required to undergo regular review and are revised by a curriculum board made up of members of the State Board, university staff, k-12 teachers, and are open for public comment prior to being adopted.
Please read and comment on the standards. Please research the folks running for your local and state school boards and vote accordingly. Please, please, involve yourself in public education. Even if you don’t have kids attending, what the kids who are attending learn will affect you. Those kids will be adults soon. And we need and deserve an informed public who do not idolize the past at the cost of the future.
