Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Education the New York Times (Biased) Way

Susannah L. Griffee is a New York Times intern and a student at New York University.

She was afforded a blog post at The Learning Network at the newspaper to help teachers teach and students to learn.

A photograph of a temporary structure with a teenage girl with an Israeli flag in her hand accompanies the post with this caption:

Palestinians seek to preserve the two-state solution in the face of encroaching Israeli settlements like this one in the West Bank.

With that prejudicial introduction, Ms. Griffee wants teachers to present these question to their pupils in this lesson plan base:

WHO announced Friday that he would seek full United Nations membership for Palestinians through the Security Council?

WHAT are the political issues and challenges surrounding the application?

WHERE is the United Nations General Assembly meeting taking place?

WHERE might land be “swapped” under an Israeli-Palestinian agreement?

WHEN did Israel become a member of the United Nations?

WHY does Palestine want to seek membership in the United Nations now?

HOW will the United States react to the Palestinians’ application?

HOW would Palestinian membership in the United Nations affect negotiations between Palestinians and Israel?

Forget the pupils, do you think the teachers know how to answer those questions properly and correctly? Do you think they have the information to do so? To guide their pupils through the complex maze?

Could not the NYTimes invited two or four inputs so that a plurality of opinion and perspective is provided?

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2 comments:

YMedad said...

Cooment left at the NYT:

Sorry, but your introduction is prejudicial based on that caption. Why should Jewish residency be an "encroachment"? Are Arab homes in Israel an "encroachment"? Should we call them "settlements", too?

Moreover, forget the pupils, do you think the teachers know how to answer those questions properly and correctly? Do you think they have the information to do so? To guide their pupils through the complex maze?

Could not the NYTimes have invited two or four inputs so that a plurality of opinion and perspective be provided?

If the Pals. seek a two-state solution, why don't they negotiate? Why didn't they take advantage of last year's construction moratorium? Why focus of land swaps when the Pals. received all of Gaza, elected Hamas, threw Fatah men off building roofs and increased terror against Israeli civilians?

Why don't you ask what are the requirements for state reconigtion and UN membership? Does the "peace-loving" standard serve as a problem?

Why not ask if the Arabs would agree that Jews live in "Palestine", and if that is a proper human rights approach?

flytouch 3 said...

Thanks so much for your article, very effective piece of writing.