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Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-909343
Gaza Children Go Back to School, But What Are They Being Taught?
(Jerusalem Post) Herb Keinon - Reuters ran a story on Monday under the headline, "Gaza students return to in-person schooling for the first time in three years." The most troubling omission in the article is its complete silence about what is being taught in these reopened schools, who is doing the teaching, and who is deciding what goes into the curriculum. For the hundreds of thousands of children returning to school to have a better future than the one Hamas has condemned them to, rebuilding the same educational system, using the same textbooks, employing the same teachers, and transmitting the same messages would simply rebuild the ideological foundations for the next Oct. 7. Whoever educates the children shapes the future. For Gaza ever to have a chance, it must free itself from an educational culture that demonizes Jews, denies Israel's legitimacy, and presents violence and "martyrdom" as heroic. Gaza needs terror-free schools that teach tolerance. It needs textbooks that do not erase Israel, teachers who are not affiliated with terrorist organizations, and classrooms where children are taught how to build a future rather than sacrifice themselves trying to destroy someone else's. Hamas can lose its tunnels, rockets and weapons yet retain enormous influence if it continues to educate the next generation according to the worldview that produced Oct. 7. Gaza's children are returning to a school system that has not undergone any fundamental ideological transformation since Oct. 7. This will not give them - or Gaza - a different future.