9/11 in Textbooks
By Callimachus | Related entries in Blogging, Education, History, The War On TerrorismMarc Schulman at “American Future” picks up on the narrative and background of the Sept. 11 attacks as it appears in some recent textbooks marketed to public high schools. Looks like there’s still some work to be done.
A different approach can be found in The American Promise, by James Roark et al., an introductory college text that is the most widely adopted textbook in the market. It is assigned in dozens of high schools, public and private, including public schools in Atlanta, Newark and Chicago. A section written by Susan Hartmann, who teaches history at Ohio State, identifies bin Laden’s goals and then explains the “why� of his finding supporters: “High levels of poverty ignored by undemocratic and corrupt governments provided bin Laden a pool of disaffected young Muslims who saw the United States as the evil source of their misery and the supporter of Israel’s oppression of Palestinian Muslims.�
To which he adds, “If Hartmann had done her homework, she would have known that the majority of terrorists are educated and come from middle-class backgrounds.”
Personally, this irritates me far more than the crescent built into the Flight 93 memorial. That’s an argument over the meaning of symbols. This is direct injection of intellectual curare into the minds of the next generation of Americans.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, Education, History, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 12th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
I’ll file this under “yet another argument for home-schooling.”
September 12th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Is it possible that high levels of poverty ignored by undemocratic and corrupt governments provided bin Laden a pool of disaffected, young, educated, middle-class Muslims who saw the United States as the evil source of the misery of their co-religionists?
By making minor changes to Hartmann’s text, I think I have something closer to the truth.
My comment is not an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. The supporters of bin Laden are murderous fanatics but, in general, they are not actually ravingly insane. In order to defeat them, one small but useful part of our strategy might be to know what motivates them and how they are recruited.
September 12th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Alan, that might be a better wording. Or it might not. You’d have to go into the writings and psychological profiles of the 19 killers to be able to say whether that was so or not. I have not done so, but my impression of at least Atta and a few others was that they were not particularly concerned with the plight of the poor in the Muslim lands, nor were they terribly interested in promoting democracy there, unless it could serve as a means to the end of reconstructing a caliphate. Other than those paths, it’s still pretty shaky to connect Muslim poverty with the “disaffection” of the 9/11 terrorists.