Interesting…
Educators in some conflict-ridden societies are using a textbook from Israel that forces students to synthesize two conflicting interpretations of history, reports Newsweek. The Peace Research Institute in the Middle East has published three booklets that divide pages into one column for the Israeli version of history, the second for the Palestinian version, and the third left blank for the student to fill in. One book describes Zionism as “the continual connection of the people of Israel to the land of Israel” while an adjacent column calls it the “imperialist political movement that bestowed a nationalist characteristic to the Jews.”
The book has been translated into English, Spanish, and Italian. It has sold 23,000 copies in France where tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims are high. Educators in Macedonia have used the book as a model for a Macedonian-Albanian history book. Around Israel the booklet has aroused enough anger among Palestinians and Israelis that few teachers dare use it in the classroom. “The idea is not to legitimize or accept the other’s narrative but to recognize it,” says Sami Adwan, a lecturer at Bethlehem University who codirects PRIME with Dan Bar-On, a social psychologist at Ben Gurion University in southern Israel.
I like the idea. A free-thinking culture, when taught conflicting views of history side-by-side, would be forced to air the discrepancies out in public. And then it would realize it was mistaken in the eyes of its members because surely there aren’t only two ways to see the problem. And with that, it would break into conversation over the myriad other viewpoints conveniently overlooked. At least that’s the theory; the only problem is that the theory assumes free-thinkers. I don’t know if we have them in an increasingly polarized world, especially in the hyper-culturally divided — and religiously indoctrinated — societies of the Middle East.
