Report Accuses Philadelphia Of Implementing Anti-American, Antisemitic Curriculum For 200,000 Students
A new report accuses the social studies curriculum of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) as being anti-Semitic and anti-American due to the curriculum’s new focus on looking at history through oppressor and…
A new report accuses the social studies curriculum of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) as being anti-Semitic and anti-American due to the curriculum’s new focus on looking at history through oppressor and oppressed categories.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) published a report Wednesday criticizing the SDP’s social studies curriculum for allegedly attacking Western values and institutions, specifically “capitalism, racism, and settler colonialism.” The report alleges the move towards “anti-racist, decolonizing curriculum” encouraged teachers to openly attack America, Zionism, and Israel in their classrooms according to Wednesday X post by CAMERA’s account.
The report alleges the SDP curriculum for World History gives little attention to prominent historical events such as the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Christian history, the Enlightenment, both World Wars, and the Holocaust. The curriculum instead focuses on “settler colonialism, displacement, genocide, how indigenous people view concepts like land and time, and the fight to preserve their language and culture,” according to the CAMERA report.
The curriculum dedicated an entire unit critiquing capitalism and relayed an overall message to students that capitalism as an economic system is unjust, according to the report. The unit fails to criticize communism in a similar way, only mentioning the ideology in relation to capitalism or as a reaction to European colonialism, the report alleges.
A unit on terrorism presents students with “What is terrorism?” scenarios to illustrate the difficulty in defining the word according to CAMERA. The scenarios include Israelis killing children in Palestinian refugee camps, Indian farmers threatening and attacking Monsanto and a 1998 US cruise missile destroying a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant while failing to mention prominent Islamic terror attacks, according to the report.