How can children feel after they have been forced to flee from their homes, live in basements or metro stations? They lost their usual lifestyle, friends, some of them lost their parents.
Like you, we are angry and fearful about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and these are terrifying times for our students. As Ukrainian educator Igor Tsyvgintsev reminds us, “The entire curriculum of school studies comes down to humaneness.”
In his sadly timeless song “Masters of War,” Bob Dylan sang: You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you sit back and watch When the death […]
Dear Rethinking Schools friends, Like you, we are angry and fearful about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is already causing immense suffering — which will only increase. These are […]
Fifty years ago — on April 30, 1970 — the U.S. military invaded Cambodia in an expansion of the Vietnam War. In response, students across the country staged massive demonstrations. […]
Three Iranian educators, scholars, and parents write about how we need to refuse narratives that normalize empire and dehumanize whole populations.
A film tackles the U.S. occupation of Japan.
Years of writing about public relations and propaganda has probably made me a bit jaded, but I was amazed nevertheless when I visited America’s Army, an online video game website […]
A former student returns from the Marines
Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.”
Six years into the ‘War on Terror
California teachers take a stand against the NCLB-aided military blitz on in-school recruiting.
Suggestions from a 5th-grade teacher on bringing the War in Iraq into the curriculum.
Preparing high schoolers for the Regents exam while studying the War in Iraq.
Getting us out of the war in Iraq and NCLB requires challenging the premises that got us into these messes in the first place.
I entered the fourth grade of Mr. Endicott, a man in his mid-30s who had arrived here without training as a teacher, one of about 15 teachers in the building […]
Emiliano Santiago. Not many of our students know his name. But they should. Santiago joined the Oregon Army National Guard on June 28, 1996, shortly after his high school graduation […]
NCLB’s provisions give military recruiters access to student contact information
How we seed and support student activism will vary from community to community, school to school, and grade level to grade level. But this is a crucial moment in history, and what we do as educators matters. When we help students explore and analyze exploitation, injustice, and danger in the world, we can also help them develop the knowledge and skills to change it.
A high school teacher critiques the textbook treatment of the Cold War and U.S. imperialism. She describes her approach to the “curricular conundrum” that the Cold War presents because it lasted so long, and was so far-flung. “”If we are ever to create a different world, one in which the United States does not cast an outsized and militarized shadow across the globe, we need our students to understand how and why that shadow was created in the first place.”
Recently, a Rethinking Schools editor was a chaperone on a field trip when he overheard a 2nd-grade student talking about how he wanted to “nuke the world.” Taken aback, he […]
A teacher uses poetry and the creation of found poems as a way to get her students to think beyond the simple “two sides to every story” narrative of the Vietnam War.
A teacher wrestles with explaining refugee crises, dictators, and the trauma of war to her 1st- and 2nd- grade classroom.
Returning to her home country of Okinawa at 13, Moé Yonamine was hit by a teacher for speaking her Indigenous language. She reflects on the history of colonial oppression in Okinawa and the importance of keeping culture and language alive.
The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom this past summer produced some brilliant commentary about the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. One of the […]
