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Newsweek
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
Shock As Millennial Teacher Shares 'Artifacts' From Youth With 6th Graders
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A history teacher in Alabama left her sixth-grade class astounded with a showcase of "artifacts" from her childhood. Malinda Nichols has taught history for 10 years and always strives to bring creative flair to the classroom, whether it's crafting parachutes like the ones the "Candy Bomber" used to deliver treats during the Berlin Airlift or tracing the journey to the 1969 Woodstock Festival. "My students don't just memorize 'dates and dead people,'" Nichols told Newsweek. "They step into the shoes of the people who lived and created history through hands-on simulations, civil discourse, examining multiple perspectives, asking hard questions, creative writing, and primary source analysis." Nichols is right to take this focus. A survey of just over 1,800 people by the American Historical Association found a little over three out of every four high school students polled felt history focused on memorizing names, dates and facts. Her aim is to make it "active, relevant and deeply human." That aim was what informed her creation of the "Museum of the Millennial" for a recent sixth grade social studies class. History teacher Malinda Nichols and her Museum of the Millennial. History teacher Malinda Nichols and her Museum of the Millennial. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram It was an idea that first sparked to life last summer, during a family vacation in Colmar, France. "We visited a toy museum with a perfectly preserved 1980s childhood bedroom on display," said Nichols. By creating an exhibit that revisited the technology and pop culture of her youth, Nichols saw an opportunity to get her students thinking about history and how "their parents live it and even they are stewards of their own historical legacy." As a teacher of modern U.S. history, she often found herself during lessons on topics like the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall telling classes "your parents lived through this, talk to them about it." The Museum of the Millennial felt like a natural extension of this but, in order to be effective, it would require the ideal primary sources; the parents. She emailed moms and dads pitching an idea for a "reverse show and tell" where they would come in and surprise the class by presenting on the personal cultural touchstones that shaped their young lives. "The response was incredible," Nichols said. "Parents supplied every artifact you see except the orange New Kids on the Block lunchbox, that one is mine." On the day of the museum's opening, Nichols had parents hide in the hallway, while she "dialed into" AOL Instant Messenger before opening the door to reveal her guest historians: the assembled crew of parents, many of whom dressed up in clothes of the era. School kids learned about Game Boys and playing POGs. School kids learned about Game Boys and playing POGs. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram Everything was done with a focus on helping students understand the major cultural and technological shifts that shaped their parents' generation. "We raised Tamagotchi pets and felt the thrill of seeing Home Alone in a packed theater. We watched the twin towers fall in real time. We saw the rise of Blockbuster, the birth of YouTube, and the shift from landlines to cellphones. We were the ones who said goodbye to analog and hello to the digital age," Nichols said. "That's pretty historic." The response among students was a mix of excitement and shock. "I passed out questions for them to ask that aligned with my state's history standards like, 'How did you find your way before GPS' and 'Would you consider yourself a latchkey kid?," Nichols said. "They couldn't fathom how long it took for us to do things they take for granted." Parents explained how to get Nintendo cartridges to work, the best method for rewinding a cassette tape, the lengths they had to go to find out how much a baseball card was worth and what texting on a PalmPilot was like. "I even did a small group instruction on how to play POGS!" Nichols said The next day kids were allowed to pick one item from the previous lesson to research further. "The most popular were Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, and the Furby," she said. A regular presence on TikTok and Instagram with posts shared under the handle @hipsterhistorywithmrsn, Nichols' Museum of the Millennial ended up going viral on TikTok, with a video showcasing the day's activities racking up almost 800,000 views. While the extra attention is undoubtedly motivated in part by nostalgia, Nichols hopes her efforts show the possibilities when subjects like history are taught "with purpose, creativity, and emphasizes the connection of our shared humanity." Parents showed how flip phones worked, how to rewind a tape with a pencil and the inner workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Parents showed how flip phones worked, how to rewind a tape with a pencil and the inner workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram The Museum of the Millennial gave students a chance to compare and contrast the world of yesterday with life as we know it now. It gave Nichols the chance to do the same. "The best part was growing up without hyper-connectivity and constant access to everything. Ask any teacher, and they'll tell you that the skills built through productive struggle have left the building. Why take the time to understand an issue when an influencer, AI, or Google can just tell you?," she said. "However, growing up as a millennial also meant pioneering the internet with no parental safety controls. AOL chat rooms were our Wild West." There have been improvements though. "The internet and social media have also created space for more voices in much-needed conversations that were often dismissed when millennials were growing up," she said. Right now Nichols is the one comparing then with now, but one day, those sixth graders will be the ones fielding questions from kids asking about what 2025 was like. They will have quite a story to tell.
Atlantic
6 days ago
- Business
- Atlantic
Feudalism Is Our Future
Judging from news accounts and interviews, numerous people in and around the Trump administration are beguiled by imperial Rome. They see themselves as interpreters of its lessons —beware immigration; uphold masculinity; make babies—and inheritors of its majesty. A banner at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, in Washington, D.C., depicted Donald Trump in Augustan profile, his brow garlanded with laurel leaves. Elon Musk styles himself 'Imperator of Mars' and has named one of his many children Romulus. Steve Bannon keeps a bust of Julius Caesar in his Capitol Hill office. Two decades ago, when maga was just a Latin word for 'enchantress,' I wrote a book about ancient Rome and modern America. The book didn't touch on masculinity or the birth rate, and it didn't try to explain the fall of Rome; the idea was just to sift through the story of a past society for clues to the one we live in now. Researching a bygone empire brought me into contact with prominent scholars who generously gave me their time. One man I think about often is the late Ramsay MacMullen, a historian at Yale and the author of the classic 1988 study Corruption and the Decline of Rome —a book whose lessons retain their grip. MacMullen was nearing 80 when I met him, still an active outdoorsman, and at the time considered the greatest living historian of the Roman empire, an honorific bestowed by the American Historical Association. We got together initially for lunch in New Haven, Connecticut, and afterward kept up by phone and email. I already knew him as a jaunty writer, spelunking among funerary inscriptions and papyrus fragments and bits of ancient poetry. In person, his short, tousled white hair complemented the way he spoke: confident, casual, polydirectional. At lunch, MacMullen brought up a wide range of topics—perhaps dwelling too long on early Church councils—but again and again came back to a single theme: what happens to a polity when central control and common purpose are eroded by expediency, self-interest, and profit. This had been the subject of his book on corruption—a word, as MacMullen used it, with connotations broader than bribery and graft. What interested him, he explained, were the mechanisms that kept the Roman empire functioning, and how grit worked its way inexorably into the cogs. Rome never had an administrative state as developed as anything we know today, but when it worked, it worked pretty well. What MacMullen called a 'train of power' linked authority at the center to faraway commanders and distant magistrates, to minters of coin and provisioners of ships—all the way 'to a hundred cobblers in the Bay-of-Naples area, a hundred peasant owners of ox-carts in Cappadocia.' From the October 2003 issue: Cullen Murphy on medieval characteristics of the present day And then it came undone. MacMullen described the problem: Over time, layers of divergent interests came between command and execution, causing the train of power to break. The breakage could come in the form of simple venality—somewhere along the way, someone found it profitable to ignore distant authority. Or it could occur because a public task was put into private hands, and those private hands had their own interests to protect. The military was largely farmed out to barbarian contractors— foederati, they were called—who did not always prove reliable, to put it mildly. In many places, the legal system was left to the marketplace: A bronze plaque survives from a public building in Numidia listing how much a litigant needed to pay, and to whom, to ensure that a lawsuit went forward. MacMullen had many examples of such breakage—a whole book of them. A political scientist might use the phrase externalization of state functions to capture much of what MacMullen was looking at. A more familiar term would be privatization, the word MacMullen himself used. By the early 2000s, after two decades of deregulation and denationalization, the term had gained wide currency in a different context: to describe the path taken by governments in the West, notably the United States and Great Britain, as ever larger chunks of public responsibility—for security, finances, education, infrastructure, data—were lopped off and put into private hands. Independent fiefdoms were coming to life everywhere. I had written about this process, and it became a big part of my book. I found myself returning to Corruption and the Decline of Rome in the early days of the current Trump administration, and wondering how MacMullen would have reacted to the rapid dismantling of government agencies and the mass firing of government workers. More and more public functions are now likely to be outsourced. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been pushing for years to privatize health care for veterans. Another administration official, Mehmet Oz, has argued for privatizing Medicare —a program he now oversees. The administration has shown interest in taking apart the National Weather Service and spinning off some of its functions. It is looking into fully privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which underpin the nation's mortgage industry. The president has floated the idea of privatizing the United States Postal Service. On his first day in office, he issued an executive order allowing the Justice Department to again send inmates to prisons run by private companies, reversing the Biden administration's policy. He has promised to deport millions of undocumented people, and elements of that effort are also being privatized. Politico reported this spring that investors led by Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary group once known as Blackwater, had sent a proposal to the White House arguing for the creation of a private military entity to set up 'processing camps' and conduct roundups, possibly with the help of private citizens deputized to make arrests. The administration has as yet said nothing about that idea, but it did award a $151 million contract to the charter company CSI Aviation to operate deportation flights—an opportunity ' too valuable not to pursue,' according to an executive of one of CSI's subcarriers. Adam Serwer: The new dark age MacMullen died three years ago, so I can't ask him about any of this. I do remember two questions I posed when we met. The first I had thought almost preposterous: Could he summarize the evolution of imperial Rome in a single sentence? He said he could do it in three words: 'Fewer have more.' The second question was about privatization, and where it leads. MacMullen was too careful a scholar to venture any grand pronouncement. There is no 'must' in history, he explained. He could speculate only about how certain processes had played out in ancient Rome. That said, he liked comparing cultures and time periods (he later sent me a paper he'd written on corruption in Rome, India, and China in three different eras), and he liked to explore ideas. He thought about my question, then bounced it back: 'Are you thinking about the Middle Ages?' he asked. 'Or are you thinking about right now?' The Middle Ages and I had a deal, or so I thought. For my part, I gave them sincere respect (the rise of universities, the revival of philosophy, the invention of eyeglasses) and romantic admiration (the mossy arches, the mottled stained glass, the wafting aroma of spit-roasted boar). I studied medieval history in college and for many years collaborated with my father on Prince Valiant, a comic strip set in the Middle Ages. Dank masonry and a roaring fire still bring a feeling of peace. From the February 1994 issue: Cullen Murphy on Prince Valiant's England In return for my love, the Middle Ages were supposed to stay where they were. But they have not. With the accelerating advance of privatization, they seem to be moving our way in the form of something that resembles feudalism. Medievalists argue over what that word really means, parsing it with contentious refinement. Was it even understood at the time? Stripped bare, though, the idea is simple enough. In Europe, as imperial power receded, a new system of organization took hold, one in which power, governance, law, security, rights, and wealth were decentralized and held in private hands. Those who possessed this private power were linked to one another, from highest to lowest, in tiers of vassalage. The people above also had obligations to the people below—administering justice, providing protection. Think of the system, perhaps, as a nesting doll of oligarchs presiding over a great mass of people who subsisted as villeins and serfs. The idea of governments as public ventures with a public purpose and some degree of public voice—what the Mayflower Compact called a 'civill Body Politick'—took a long time to claw its way back into existence. Most people in the developed world have been living in a civill Body Politick, or something that aspires to be one, for several centuries. I won't overstate how successful this experiment has been, but it's the reason we have police forces rather than vigilantes, and safety nets rather than alms thrown haphazardly from horseback by men in tights. In the 1980s and '90s, privatization started gaining traction again, and it had plenty of help. Anti-government sentiment created opportunities, and entrepreneurs seized them. Privatization was also pushed by policy makers who saw outsourcing as inherently more efficient. And besides, the public sector can't do everything. Case by case, privatization of this or that may well make sense. The problem comes in the sheer accumulation. In the U.S., even before Trump took office a second time, there were roughly twice as many people employed by private contractors to do the federal government's business as there were federal employees. As the pace of privatization picked up in the 21st century, the idea of 'neo-feudalism' or 'techno-feudalism' began to interest scholars and theorists— Joel Kotkin, Jodi Dean, Robert Kuttner, and Yanis Varoufakis, among others. Most of the scholars are profoundly wary: They foresee an erosion of transparency, a disregard for individual rights, and a concentration of power among an ever smaller group of wealthy barons, even as the bulk of the population is relegated to service jobs that amount to a modern form of serfdom. For their part, theorists on the techno-libertarian or neo-reactionary fringe, observing from egg chairs in the Sky Lounge, see all these same things, and can't wait. The meaning and consequences of privatization may be up for debate, but the phenomenon itself can't be argued away. To run through a few examples: Holding a monopoly on control of the money supply was once a hallmark of public power. In the span of a decade, private cryptocurrencies have undermined that control while at the same time enabling a wide range of illicit activities. Cryptocurrencies are hard to regulate even when there's a will, which there often isn't. In the U.S., Trump and his family are heavily involved in the crypto business. In April, the president announced that he would invite the top 220 investors in his $TRUMP meme coin to a private dinner; the value of the meme coin rose within hours by 60 percent. A monopoly on the legitimate use of force—replacing the knights and pikemen of sundry vassals with professional standing armies—was another traditional hallmark of public power. Donald Rumsfeld famously observed that 'you go to war with the army you have,' but another option today is 'the army you rent.' Globe-spanning private military companies such as the Wagner Group and Triple Canopy recall the roving mercenary Landsknechte of yore. The world is awash with mustered-out veterans of recent wars. Governments and corporations alike often want kinetic solutions without legal oversight. ('Like medieval mercenaries,' a 2019 report from National Defense University observes, today's freelance personnel 'can prove overly brutal when executing contracts.') From 2007 to 2012, the U.S. alone spent $160 billion on private security contractors. Growing up alongside them—an industry even larger in size—are the private intelligence-gathering companies, such as Palantir, on which the U.S. spends a significant portion of its intelligence budget. The very name Palantir seems to harken back, via Tolkien, to a feudal world. Public police forces with a mission to protect everyone are largely a 19th-century invention. But police forces are shrinking. In the U.S., anyone with money and a need now hires private security guards, who outnumber police officers by a ratio of 2 to 1. Among companies based in the U.S., the third-largest global employer —after Amazon and Walmart—is a private security firm, Allied Universal. Private guards patrol small towns and swaths of entire cities. A consortium of hundreds of businesses in Portland, Oregon, hired a company named Echelon Protective Services to secure their downtown precinct, day and night. During the fires that devastated Los Angeles in January, the wealthiest residents of Brentwood called in the secretive security firm Covered 6 to protect their homes from looting. As for personal protection, the market has no ceiling. Mark Zuckerberg's reported annual budget for personal security is $23 million, five times more than the pope pays for the Swiss Guards. As in medieval times, the affluent withdraw behind barriers. If it were built today, Windsor Castle would be described in the sales prospectus as a 'privately governed residential community.' In the 1990s, when the economist Robert Reich began writing about 'the secession of the successful,' some 3 million American housing units were lodged inside gated communities, which protected a population of about 8 million. Today, gated communities encompass 14 million housing units. On its website, a real-estate company in Florida earlier this year asked readers, 'Is a Moat Right for You?' It was an April Fools' joke, but not a very good one, because modern moated residences already exist. Perhaps the most exclusive gated community in the world is actually an island— Indian Creek Village, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with 89 residents (including Jeff Bezos, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner) and a perimeter-security radar system designed by the Israeli company Magos. Officers in speedboats intercept anyone venturing too close. Privatization has also upended the law. One example from an ambitious survey by Robert Kuttner and Katherine V. W. Stone in The American Prospect : the growing use of compulsory arbitration, written by corporations into private contracts, as a way of settling consumer and employment disputes. The public court system is clogged. Arbitration—the 'outsourcing of jurisprudence,' as the authors call it—creates a parallel private system, one in which efficiency may be more highly valued than public oversight or due process. Oversight more broadly—of the environment, food, drugs, finance—has been drifting for decades into the hands of those being overseen. In their 2021 book, The Privatization of Everything, Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian documented the loss of public control over water, roads, welfare, parks, and much else. The deliberate dismantling of government in America in recent months, and its replacement with something built on privatized power and networks of personal allegiance, accelerates what was long under way. Its spirit was captured decades ago in a maxim of Ronald Reagan's economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum: 'Don't just stand there— undo something!' One of the most watched television programs in the U.K. last year was the ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a dramatized version of events that took place starting decades ago. Britain's postal system, once overseen directly by a government minister, became a (government-owned) statutory corporation in 1970. In time, parts of it were spun off—since the days of Margaret Thatcher, the nation has pursued privatization more aggressively than most other countries—and the legal and oversight structure was subjected to continual tinkering. In a deal originating as a 'public-private partnership' arrangement, the Post Office in the late 1990s computerized its accounting and other operations; the system was supplied by a U.K. company that was then acquired by the technology giant Fujitsu. Glitches in the software soon resulted in hundreds of rural postmasters being falsely accused of theft and summarily fired. Several went to prison. A number committed suicide. Fujitsu has acknowledged the errors; it does not accept blame for the entire cascade of injustice. Inside the Post Office, corporate opacity and dispersed responsibility made concealment easy and accountability hard. Without investigative reporting by the trade publication Computer Weekly —and, of course, the TV series—there might have been no accountability at all. In the end, the head of the Post Office suffered an ironically feudal fate: Formerly a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, she had her CBE status revoked by King Charles III. And Mr. Bates, the local postmaster who organized resistance by the subpostmasters, was knighted. Mr Bates vs the Post Office enjoyed great storytelling advantages—a gnomish hero, angry villagers, and all that verdant countryside. But grit working its way into the cogs of government is rarely cinematic or even in public view. The consequences may reveal themselves slowly, and often come down to the fine print. In 2008, desperate for cash, Chicago privatized its parking meters, selling off the rights to all the revenue for 75 years to a group of investors led by Morgan Stanley. A 'true-up' provision in the contract requires the city to compensate investors for lost revenue when meters are taken out of service—a provision that weighs on decision making whenever the city considers projects that would eliminate meters or favor mass transit over cars. The rights to operate toll highways have been sold off by some jurisdictions to private companies, including foreign ones. The fine print in the contracts often prevents improvements to adjacent roads on the grounds that such enhancement would create undue competition. Private prisons generally put a quota clause into their agreements. States and municipalities may be hoping, as a matter of policy, to reduce their prison populations, but the beds in private prisons must be filled regardless. Evoking the train of power that enables effective government, MacMullen wrote: 'At every point of connection the original intent must be transmitted as it was received. Otherwise it will come to nothing.' Control and accountability are the bedrock. Control: Who makes the decisions and who decides whether they will be executed—and for whose benefit? Accountability: Who determines whether something has gone wrong, and who determines whether the problem is fixed? In a privatized world, government becomes 'diffuse, unstable, unpredictable,' and the skein of responsibility more and more attenuated. Contractors hire subcontractors, who hire subcontractors of their own. 'I can't tell you about the sub to the sub to the sub,' a NATO official told The New York Times in 2010 when asked about convoy guards in Afghanistan who turned out to be in league with the Taliban. Throughout much of our spun-off government today, 'the sub to the sub to the sub' is almost a job description. Is feudalism our future? There is no 'must' in history, and the present is as much a riddle as anything that lies ahead. A privatized world may be a temporary aberration, a new stage of development, or just the default setting of human society. Our own era doesn't have a name yet, and it won't be up to us to give it one. From the perspective of some far-distant vantage point, the age we inhabit may even come to seem 'Middle.' With contentious refinement, historians will parse what 'privatization' might have meant, and wonder whether we understood it at the time.
NBC News
29-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Governor signs ban on DEI in Ohio public colleges despite opposition by students and teachers
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Republican Gov. Mike DeWine has signed legislation to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and make other sweeping changes to public colleges and universities in Ohio. Students, teachers and civil rights groups had called for a veto by DeWine, whose office announced the signing Friday without further comment by the governor. The American Historical Association, American Civil Liberties Union, the American Association of University Professors, Ohio's two largest K-12 teachers' unions and Democrats all called on DeWine to reject Senate Bill 1, which also will prohibit faculty strikes and limit classroom discussion. Ohio House Minority Leader Allison Russo said DeWine's long career in public service will be tarnished by his decision. 'The governor now has to live with the consequences that will haunt his legacy because signing SB 1 into law begins the inevitable destruction of Ohio's cherished higher education system by legalizing state-sponsored censorship and discrimination,' she said in a statement. '(I)t will damage our economy and future by making Ohio an extremely undesirable place to learn and work, and it radically undermines the collective bargaining rights of workers.' The measure, which sparked hourslong hearings and protests attended by hundreds of demonstrators, was a priority of the GOP-supermajority Legislature, after dying amid partisan infighting last session. This year, it moved quickly. After being introduced in January, it cleared the Senate in February, cleared the Ohio House with changes 59-34 last week, and was given final approval on a 20-11 vote in the Senate on Wednesday. Besides banning DEI programs and rescinding certain collective bargaining and tenure protections for faculty, the new law also will make schools promise not to influence student views on 'controversial' topics, require every Ohio college student to take a three-hour civics education course and impose dozens of other programmatic and administrative changes. Schools that violate its provisions will risk losing their state funding. The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Cleveland-area Republican, had said the bill aims to protect 'intellectual diversity,' not dampen it. During Senate debate on the bill in February, Cirino called DEI a 'debacle' that 'has morphed into institutional discrimination' against conservative perspectives. 'It was a long, hard road but well worth the effort,' Cirino said in a statement Friday. 'I believe this is monumentally significant legislation that will allow Ohio's public universities and community colleges to deal with looming enrollment challenges and usher in a renaissance of academic excellence.' Republican President Donald Trump has made the same argument as he has taken aim at DEI programs at the federal level, to the relief and delight of many conservatives. A group of federal employees targeted for dismissal because of their involvement in such activities has filed a class-action complaint against the administration. And on Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked another of the president's DEI-related executive orders affecting federal contractors and grant recipients. ACLU of Ohio Policy Director Jocelyn Rosnick said the bill 'sends a clear, harmful message to students that their unique backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are not welcome in Ohio.' 'Further, the exceedingly vague and contradictory language regarding the banning of so-called 'controversial beliefs or policies' creates a slippery slope for faculty and administration,' she said in a statement. 'This could lead to faculty avoiding any such topics in classrooms for fear of retaliation.'
Jordan Times
09-02-2025
- Politics
- Jordan Times
Scholasticide in Gaza: History is screaming to the Present
AMMAN — The American Historical Association (AHA), the world's largest body of professional historians, recently ignited a debate after passing a resolution condemning Israel's destruction of Gaza's education system – only to have its elected council veto the measure. The resolution accused Israel of committing 'scholasticide,' a term coined by Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi in 2009 to describe the systematic destruction of Palestinian educational institutions. While the resolution gained support at the AHA's annual convention on January 15, the elected council ultimately vetoed it, fuelling an intense ethical and political debate over the role of historians in times of crisis. AHA's Veto : A controversial silence ? Founded in 1884, the AHA has long played a central role in shaping historical discourse. Yet, its leadership's rejection of the resolution underscores the tension between academic neutrality and moral accountability. AHA convention-goers overwhelmingly approved the resolution on January 15, but the association's 16-member elected council vetoed it without allowing a full membership vote. The council could have either accepted the resolution or referred it to AHA's 10,450 members but chose to reject it. In its written explanation, the council condemned the destruction of Palestinian educational institutions in Gaza but argued the resolution fell outside of AHA's mission, which focuses on promoting historical research, teaching, and preservation rather than political advocacy. However, this stance was met with backlash from scholars who believe that remaining silent in the face of destruction is itself a political act. 'Historians who opposed the scholasticide resolution insisted that taking a position would harm the AHA, which is supposedly a 'non-political' organisation. The truth is that our tax dollars have funded 15 months of Israeli annihilation: not taking a stance a position will leave a lasting stain on the association and the discipline. Silence is complicity,' said Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, in an interview with The Jordan Times. 'The task of the historian is to ask hard questions and to take difficult positions, not when the dust settles, but as the fire reigns,' she added. Notably, the AHA's hesitation stands in contrast to its previous actions. In 2022, the association swiftly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, issuing a statement denouncing Vladimir Putin's distortion of history to justify military aggression. 'The opposition to the scholasticide resolution thus deems the question of Palestine as 'political' and Palestinian lives as less valuable,' Seikaly said. Barbara Weinstein, Professor of History at New York University and former AHA president, emphasised that scholasticide is a recognised phenomenon under international law. 'The right to learn and preserve historical evidence should be included in the broader category of human rights,' Weistein told The Jordan Times. 'And I believe that anyone who is a historian and claims that their work is 'not political' is either a fool or a scoundrel. It is utter nonsense to say that historians should stay out of politics. Every decision we make – what we research, what archives we explore, what histories we choose to amplify, is imbued with a vision of the world that I would describe as political.' As to whether the AHA, as an organisation, should stay out of politics, Weistein said : 'The very defence of history as a discipline is political, the association is engaged in advocacy by its very nature. During my time as a president, the AHA issued a statement severely criticising a move by the European Union to criminalise Holocaust denial, including in work by historians. Needless to say, no one on the AHA executive council was in favour of Holocaust denial, but we argued that his was the sort of issue that should be 'adjudicated' by other – better – historians, and not be a matter for the criminal justice system. How is that not political ?' Erasing Palestinian intellectual heritage While the AHA debates its stance, the reality on the ground in Gaza grows more dire by the day. Since the war broke out in October 2023, Israel's military assault has led to the widespread destruction of Gaza's educational infrastructure. The destruction extends far beyond physical buildings. 'Armed and abetted by the United States, Israel has destroyed 80% of schools and every single university in the Gaza Strip. Israel has targeted and killed scholars from across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM. Israel has destroyed almost every library, archive, and cultural centre in the Strip,' Seikaly said, adding that centuries of endowments, collections, and documents are now gone forever. Beyond destruction, evidence has emerged of Israeli forces repurposing Palestinian schools as military outposts and detention centres. The European-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has documented such cases as the Salah Al-Din Preparatory School in Gaza City, turned into a detention and interrogation facility in February 2024, and other civilian buildings, including schools, being systematically demolished after being used as military headquarters. The Human Rights organisation stated that such actions violate international humanitarian law, which mandates the protection of civilian infrastructure. A generation without education In April 2024, UN experts issued an urgent warning over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, and the mass killing, arrest, and detention of students and educators. Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, also underscored the severity of the situation: 'The education system in Gaza no longer exists. Children can no longer find a place to learn.' The UNICEF echoed this assessment, confirming the complete collapse of the educational system in Gaza. The consequences of this annihilation are dire. According to UN figures, more than 5,500 students, 261 teachers, and 95 university professors have been killed during Israeli assaults. More than 7,800 students and 756 teachers have been injured. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) confirmed that 60% of educational institutions, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed, including 76 schools that were directly targeted, and at least 625,000 students are now left without access to education. The destruction of Israa University in January 2024 marked a grim milestone – the last remaining university in Gaza reduced to rubble. 'Even UN-designated 'safe zones' have not been spared, with schools sheltering displaced civilians bombed repeatedly. The persistent attacks are depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future,' the UN statement read. The impact of this devastation extends beyond the present, threatening the very survival of Palestinian culture, history, and intellectual life. 'When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams,' the experts stated. Scholasticide: a key feature of genocide The term 'scholasticide' describes a deliberate genocidal strategy to dismantle an entire society's ability to document its history and build its future, as well as its right to knowledge. The implications go beyond the immediate loss of human lives and infrastructures. 'The concept of 'scholasticide' is significant both as a means to denounce forms of destruction that wreak permanent damage on the society, but also as a way of thinking about 'repairing' that damage (to the extent possible) when the war finally ends,' Weinstein said. Historically, the destruction of educational institutions has been a hallmark of genocide. From the systematic targeting of schools in Iraq to the mass killing of educators in Gaza, scholars have long documented how obliterating intellectual heritage aims to erase a people's past.
Express Tribune
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
The attack on education in Gaza is a warning for the world
On January 6, 2025, the American Historical Association (AHA) overwhelmingly voted in favour of a resolution titled 'Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza'—a move that explicitly condemned the destruction of Palestinian education by the Israeli military. Proposed by Historians for Peace and Democracy, the resolution passed with 428 members in favour, 88 against, and four abstentions. It underscored how Israel's military campaign in Gaza, bolstered by over $12.5 billion in U.S. military aid from October 2023 to June 2024, had effectively obliterated Gaza's education system. UN experts warned as early as April 2024 that Israel's attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students amounted to a deliberate effort to eradicate Palestinian education—an act defined as scholasticide. Scholasticide is often an overlooked aspect of imperial warfare, but its consequences are complex and long-lasting. The term scholasticide refers to the systematic destruction of educational institutions, scholars, and knowledge systems as a means of suppressing a people's cultural and intellectual future. Coined by the Palestinian scholar Karma Nabulsi, the concept has deep historical roots, aligning with broader frameworks of epistemic violence and cultural genocide. In an interview with Democracy Now, Sherene Seikaly, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, spoke about the AHA conference, declaring that the victory of the resolution represented a moment of resistance against the ongoing obliteration of Palestinian intellectual life. 'Since October 2023, Israel, armed, aided and abetted by the United States, has destroyed 80% of the schools in the Gaza Strip and every single university. And another thing that I think is often put to the side or marginalised, and we really have to centre as historians, is that almost every single archive, library and bookstore have been bombed and destroyed by Israel. And so, this genocide is really attempting to destroy our capacity to narrate our past and to imagine our future.' In Gaza, reports confirmed that by December 2024 more than 230 schools had been destroyed, and at least 140,000 students had been left without access to formal education. The statistics are staggering, with 261 teachers and 95 university professors killed, dozens of universities bombed beyond repair, and nearly half a million students displaced from their learning environments. This is not collateral damage but an intentional war against Palestinian intellectual survival. Schools and universities are deliberately bombed under the justification that they harbour 'militants,' despite being filled with students and faculty members. This mirrors historical instances of colonial and imperialist regimes targeting education as a means of eradicating resistance, identity, and intellectual autonomy. Education has always been a battleground in imperialist warfare. Throughout history, imperialist regimes have deliberately destroyed indigenous education systems to control, assimilate, or eliminate colonised peoples. The term 'epistemic violence' describes how dominant groups erase, suppress, or devalue the knowledge systems of the colonised. British colonialism in India saw the deliberate dismantling of centuries-old learning institutions in favour of English-language education policies, a system formalised in 1835 under Thomas Macaulay's infamous "Minute on Indian Education", a pivotal document in the history of British colonial education policy in India. Macaulay argued for the promotion of English education in India and for the systematic undermining of local languages and literatures. Similarly, in the Americas, the Spanish conquest of the sixteenth century led to the wholesale destruction of indigenous libraries, including the systematic burning of Mayan codices in 1562 by Bishop Diego de Landa, who saw them as heretical. Only a few fragments of these rich intellectual traditions survive today. French colonial rule in Algeria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries systematically suppressed Arabic-language education, closing Islamic madrasas and replacing them with French-language schools that sought to erase Algerian identity. Similar policies were enacted in West Africa, where France's policy of assimilation ensured that local histories and languages were effectively erased from curricula. For example, in Senegal, the French colonial government imposed a curriculum that was entirely based on French values and history. This meant that the rich oral traditions, local folklore, and histories of the Senegalese people were excluded from education. These historical precedents demonstrate how education is not merely a neutral institution but a deeply political one, weaponised to maintain control over subjugated peoples. In the event of epistemic violence and culture erasure, many scholars are rejecting neutrality. Edward Said reminds us that the major task of the intellectual is to 'reveal the disparity between the so-called two sides, which appear rhetorically and ideologically to be in perfect balance but are not in fact. To reveal that there is an oppressed and an oppressor, a victim and a victimiser, and unless we recognise that, we are nowhere'. Imperial regimes have always targeted centres of knowledge production. When a people's intellectual foundation is destroyed, so is their ability to resist, rebuild, and reclaim their autonomy. In the face of cultural genocide and epistemic erasure, we must focus on restoring and revitalising traditional knowledge systems, which are systematically undermined by colonial powers. This involves not only protecting local languages and cultural practices but also integrating traditional knowledge into contemporary education frameworks. Oral traditions and other community-based knowledge sharing practices should be given due appreciation and funding alongside the formal education systems that have historically marginalised them. Leveraging modern technology also presents an opportunity for historically oppressed communities to bypass traditional barriers to education and knowledge preservation. Digital platforms can serve as modern archives for indigenous knowledge, providing access to resources that have been denied or distorted in mainstream educational systems. Decolonising education is a critical step, which requires dismantling curricula that have long been rooted in Western, colonial ideologies. This isn't just about adding indigenous perspectives but rethinking the very foundation of what is considered valuable knowledge. By shifting from a Eurocentric model to one that equally honours local epistemologies, we must challenge who holds the authority over knowledge, ensuring that threatened communities themselves are the driving force behind initiatives for change.
