I am almost so stunned as to be wordless…almost. What is it today? Tennessee…it is Tennessee that has me on the ropes. I am seriously considering building a bunker in a mountainside somewhere and holing up until the stupid drains from the earth. I know…I should stock up on Brawndo, because it won’t be anytime soon.
Why does Tennessee have me fearing for all of us? The standards committee of the school board has proposed a new standard to remove almost all of Islamic history from the text books for 7th grade world history. When I say almost all, I mean they took out everything Islam related to the Arabian peninsula…why don’t you read it in their words:
Gone from the draft “Islamic World” are 11 standards, ranging from the physical location and features of the Arabian Peninsula to the expansion of Muslim rule and cultural diffusion of Islam and the Arabic language, the origins of Islam and the life and teaching of Muhammad, including the historical connection to Christianity and Judaism. Also gone is a standard about understanding the Qur’an and Sunnah, different sections within Islam, the Sunnis and Shi’ites, contributions of Muslim scholars, trade routes of Arab society, art and architecture, including the Taj Mahal, the importance of Memed II the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent and writing an explanatory text about the Sha Abbas and how his cultural blending led to the Golden Age and the rise of the Safavid Empire.
Yep…nothing important to world history there..trade routes, why the world is the way it is today, art, architecture …not important. They want to pretend that the geography of an entire peninsula that covers 1.2 million square miles (how big is that? Just smush Alaska, Texas, California, and Montana together…) never existed. What? Oh…they shouldn’t teach things related to religion in 7th grade world history? OK. I would be fine with that except these same standards still include Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions.
Why then is Islam singled out? Because a new law prohibits “proselytizing” for any religion and there were complaints from scared parents that their crotchfruit are being indoctrinated into Islam just by hearing about it in class. Did the nap-time mats face east? Did they hire radical jihadists to come in and teach that section? Did they start calling field trips, “pilgrimages”? I wonder if these are the same parents that want school led prayer in the classroom…because that isn’t an attempt at indoctrination. No sir…
All I can do is sigh…so teaching the history of Islam is proselytizing, yet teaching other religions seems to work out just fine? I see…so when asked about this new change the VP of the school board said, “Islam is still part of history, we just aren’t teaching it.” Whew! I was worried it wasn’t even a part of history any more. Apparently they believe that Islam is just like Freddy Krueger, if you ignore him, he ceases to exist…at least in early movies.
I am then compelled to ask, if these parents believe that teaching is analogous to indoctrination, why then do they still let the school teach their delicate sproggen about Hitler, Stalin, Mengele, Himmler, Eichmann, Caligula, Attila, Genghis Khan, Idi Amin, Ivan the Terrible, Pol Pot or numerous others? Are we no longer teaching that slavery happened? Do their children come home and ask for their allowance so they can buy a slave?
Islam in and of itself isn’t a bad thing…no worse than any other religion. Odd then that they still teach the history of the other religions and their heinous practices (Inquisition, Roman persecution of Christians, Salem Witch hunts), yet no one fears indoctrination. What if all their precious little snowflakes put a Christian kid in a ring with a pit bull or decided to burn at the stake the little girl in class that gets 100 on every test because she must be a witch?
Let’s remove anything that teaches historical facts because understanding something is a bad idea. What if our kids learned the history of a group of people and decided not to fear or hate? Awful…we need to keep ignorance alive! The parents in Tennessee can’t very well have their children being tolerant of those that are different now, can they? Not teaching leads to ignorance, which leads to fear, hate, and repetition of mistakes. What are the parents of the children in Tennessee really afraid of? Knowledge? Understanding? Or is it that their children may not hate Muslims? Oh the humanity!
ISIS is a very small splinter group of Islam (less than .01%)…much as gang membership is an incredibly small percentage of the white community (less than .01% of white youths are gang members – didn’t see that one coming, did you?). Yet they haven’t removed white history from the books. Any Muslim you meet is as likely to be in ISIS as a white youth is to be in a gang. Actually of the 3.3 million Muslims in the US, the chance that the one you see in the street is an ISIS follower is less than 1/3300. Strangely enough, due to the properties of statistics, the chance that the white kid standing beside him is in a gang is 1/2466. So…who should you should be more frightened to run into on the street? White kid or Muslim? Should we stop teaching history pertaining to white people?
I believe that we can all understand the difference between these two statements? Muslims believe that Muhammad was the last messenger of God sent to show humans the proper path…or…You must all worship Allah as Muhammad has told you. If you are concerned that your teacher is using the latter, then call the principal and have a talk. If my child’s astronomy teacher spent all the class time pushing astrology and trying to convince the kids to come to her private shop for readings, instead of explaining how astrology was derived from astronomical systems, we would get that corrected. I wouldn’t march in and demand that the school board yank all reference to astrology from the texts.
The texts in these standards don’t teach that Islam is the one true path, they teach about where it comes from and its effect on the world around us…including the link between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Did you know that Mary is talked about more in the Q’uran than in the new testament? That the birth of Jesus is covered in depth as well?
I’ve got the solution…let’s sanitize the history books altogether! Why don’t we start at the beginning and remove anything that anyone could find offensive or “triggering”.
OK. No more teaching about the Neanderthal because that word is now used as an insult. No more covering the domestication of animals because we appropriated entire species for our use. That is offensive to some. We can’t teach the cradle of civilization at the Tigris and Euphrates because that is in Iraq and that would lead to questions about the aforementioned peninsula, which we all know indoctrinates kids into radical Islam. (Here’s a question that is sure to upset some of you: If we are so all consumed with making someone say,”radical Islamic terror”, can I be sure to hear “radical Christian terror” instead of “lone wolf nutbag” when someone blows up a Planned Parenthood?) I could go on about polytheism and the Greeks, Romans, and Norse and that would offend all the theists…you get the point that there would be very little left to teach if we pulled out anything that was potentially scary, different, or offensive, yes?
Even if we make the massive leap that all of Islam is our enemy (which it is not), shouldn’t that mean we need to learn everything possible about them? What military strategist uses the, “Don’t know, don’t care” method for battle preparation? None that you know of, because they didn’t survive long enough to tell you how that worked out for them.
This march towards omitting things we don’t like from history puts us on a very dangerous path. History covers all things human, the good, bad, and everything in between so that we may learn. Yanking the study of an entire empire and its effect on the world as we know it simply because a few parents are now scared that their kids may become jihadists is ludicrous. Maybe they should spend some time with their kids and help guide them in the right direction if they are that malleable. These must be the same kids that watch Looney Tunes, paint tunnels on walls, and try to run headlong through them.
I will end with some slogans you may be familiar with: “As your body grows bigger, your mind grows flowered. It’s great to learn because knowledge is power!”, “The more you know…”, “Knowing is half the battle”. I must have missed the, “Don’t learn about things that scare your parents because they are uneducated xenophobes!” lesson on Reading Rainbow or Electric Company or whatever those shows were that tried to teach me stuff…
Above the Nonsense 