Curriculum reform.

In "Curriculum reform should start in the U.S. and Israel" (The Electronic Intifada, 18 August 2003), Joseph Massad focuses on the irony of the United States calling for school curricula changes across the Arab and Muslim world to better reflex the American and Israeli view of history. Massad writes, "While few in the Arab world would question the need to overhaul school curricula across Arab countries to eliminate the biases that each regime injects them against myriad national and international causes, including historical inaccuracies, the position of religion in civic life, sectarian biases, gender biases, ethnic biases, and the like, most are astonished that such calls would be issued by the United States and its local subsidiary in the Middle East, Israel. The amazement is due to the fact that the school curricula and textbooks which the United States and Israel both use are in need of equally, if not more, major overhauling, to come close to objective, or at least more inclusive, representations of reality." This article first appeared in Al-Ahram Weekly.