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By Paul Salvatori
Final week in Halifax a number of college students had been requested to take away their Kufiyahs, identified to many because the checkered (black and white) Palestinian scarf, from their particular person at Park West Faculty. In addition this was throughout a “Tradition Day” on the college to honor the distinctiveness and variety of various peoples.
Saltwire reported that based on Lana Khammash, president of the Atlantic Canada Palestinian Society (ACPS), the principal informed college students that the Kufiyah signified “struggle.” The Maritimes information outlet nonetheless, like a number of others, didn’t clarify whether or not it was the principal themselves who requested the kufiyahs be eliminated.
It’s absolutely dangerous sufficient when anybody, not to mention younger folks, is requested to take away their Kufiyah —representing the energy, resilience, and unity of the Palestinian folks. A wholly constructive image, there is no such thing as a cause why somebody ought to ever be requested to take it off.
I reached out to Khammash to be taught extra about what occurred at Park West. By telephone, she shared with me that, based on data ACPS obtained, “[The principal] gave directions [to staff]…that if the youngsters within the classroom are carrying the kufiyahs inform them to take away it. …[If they don’t] they are going to be despatched to the principal’s workplace.”
It stunned by that the principal can be so apparent in expressing their anti-Palestinian racism. Removed from the extra delicate or insidious types of such racism, I’m used to studying about in Canada a minimum of, their “directions” mimic these of a dictator, issuing a public command to be carried out instantly, moderately than an academic administrator—genuinely involved concerning the well-being and dignity college students.
Furthermore, as a principal, you must know that whenever you single out college students, for no matter concern, it’s a critical deal. Whether or not the scholar has in truth completed something mistaken the consequence of this—and I consider many people can communicate from expertise having as soon as been younger college students—is often not good. They may usually be left feeling fearful, ashamed or apprehensive.
In gentle of that reality alone you have to make additional positive that treating a pupil in another way from others is warranted. The principal at Park West didn’t. Had they completed so, which might have concerned them doing a little accountable analysis on what the kufiyah means (and there’s no scarcity on-line or elsewhere to search out such data), they’d have discovered that it doesn’t signify struggle and thereafter made college students take away theirs on that faulty foundation.
The precise extent to which the principal was concerned within the college students eradicating their kufiyahs, to not point out the lecturers who facilitated that, is but to be decided by any thorough investigation. At any fee that the varsity performed a direct position within the college students eradicating their kufiyahs undermines what it’s set as much as do: interact college students in studying. As a substitute, it despatched the message, each to the scholars carrying the kufiyahs and the bigger pupil physique, that “we don’t tolerate or settle for Palestine right here.”
Certainly that is a part of the erasure, by a lot of the West, of Palestinian historical past, tradition, and id. However to say that isn’t sufficient. As well as, the message confirms that the varsity is dedicated to stopping college students from studying about Palestine, by their fellow friends—as might’ve occurred if Park West was internet hosting a Tradition Day the place all college students had been allowed to share and trade concepts about their backgrounds, together with why someplace the kufiyah.
I don’t assume utilizing the time period “dedicated” is simply too sturdy, particularly after we consider how the principal allegedly acted. Particularly, they didn’t wait til the top of the varsity day or one other time to debate their concern, if you’ll, with the scholars concerning the kufiyah. By Khammash’s account, they acted swiftly, as if the kufiyahs themselves posed a menace to the integrity of the varsity. And it’s not a stretch to say that within the thoughts of the principal that’s the precise that means they’d. In spite of everything symbols of struggle are sometimes invites to violence. The one actual violence nonetheless that happened at Park West was that endured by the scholars who needed to take away their kufiyahs, thereby pressured to expertise pointless humiliation and disgrace.
By the identical token, the scholars are wholly entitled to the apology that has been referred to as for, on the a part of these supporting the scholars. I’d humbly recommend that the apology embody robbing the scholar physique from studying about what the kufiyah means, particularly by the varsity’s rendering it invisible (having sure college students it off) and so not one thing that might in any other case provoke mental curiosity. That is notably upsetting. It’s usually by mental curiosity that we’re most prepared and ready to be taught, versus when issues are foisted on us as “obligatory”—in or exterior the classroom.
What occurred at Park West speaks to the statement by the well-known Italian thinker of training, Maria Montessori, that “the basic downside in training shouldn’t be an academic downside in any respect: it’s a social one. It consists within the institution of a brand new and higher relationship between the 2 nice sections of society—kids and adults.”
The explanation for this displays Montessori’s extra normal view that inside society adults, whether or not they acknowledge it or not, are inclined to oppress kids for his or her “personal good”, as when they’re enrolled, for instance, by dad and mom in extracurricular actions (e.g. athletics) that continuously hassle them and wherein they take no enjoyment. The destructiveness of this dynamic was additionally current at Park West’s Tradition Day the place workers—each cruelly and paternalistically—made college students take away the kufiyah as if this had some academic worth.
In a progressive college, the scholars would have the correct to straight problem workers, with impunity, concerning the “legitimacy” of getting to take away the kufiyah. This has nothing to do with selling adolescent revolt for its personal sake. Quite the correct in query serves as an vital verify towards the grownup world, together with lecturers and directors, who usually and fairly merely are mistaken. Our society, nonetheless, maybe paralleling its normal angle in direction of Palestine, continues to normalize the ageist view that adults are “all the time proper.” Training is straight away jeopardized the place colleges, implicitly or explicitly, subscribe to this view.
American training critic and author Jonathan Kozol is right here instructive:
Academics have the correct to see what they consider with out the concern of accusation or self-accusation. No pupil, nonetheless, needs to be pressured to undergo social ostracism, nor compelled to pay a worth, past that of the ethical anguish of the difficulty, in itself, for taking a stance in opposition to that of the trainer. Each circumstances can, and should, be realized by an moral trainer in revolt towards all that’s implied, inflicted, or mirrored by the usual dogmatism of the textbooks, the curricula, and the time-embedded customs and conventions that prevail immediately.
By the identical token, we should create the circumstances in colleges wherein lecturers and college students alike can interact in significant dialogue about Palestine. This contains Palestinian college students, with the lived expertise that usually entails (e.g. being the goal of anti-Palestinian racism or enduring the intergenerational trauma of harmful Israeli militarism), with the ability to problem their lecturers within the classroom after they mischaracterize Palestine itself, not to mention what they may be carrying such because the kuffiyeh.
To attain this it’s not sufficient that colleges have “anti-oppressive” mandates. We see again and again how colleges that do, whether or not in Toronto or Halifax, are hostile to Palestinian voices, expressions of Palestinian solidarity, and efforts to fight anti-Palestinian racism. For a similar cause, it’s not assuring that the Halifax Regional Centre for Training despatched a “range group” to Park West final Monday, to handle the varsity’s anti-Palestinian racism.
To be anti-oppressive within the true sense of the time period we’d like, paralleling Palestinian activist and scholar Ramzy Baroud’s notion of solidarity as an motion moderately than sentimentality, to develop colleges that, on the one hand, enable college students and lecturers to speak concerning the colonial actuality endured by Palestine (underneath Israeli rule and oppression) and, on the opposite, how they—as residents of the world and folks of conscience—can act to finish it, as real allies to the Palestinian folks themselves.
Some would possibly object that this turns colleges into websites of activism. That nonetheless is the purpose. Training is empty, if not altogether self-serving if it’s not empowering college students to determine the way to overturn injustice. This would possibly ruffle workers at Park West however it’s how younger folks, nonetheless step by step, remodel humanity for the higher.
– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, neighborhood employee and artist. A lot of his work on Palestine entails public training, equivalent to by his lately created interview sequence, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Darkish Room Podcast), the place he speaks with writers, students and activists. He contributed this text to The Palestine Chronicle.
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