Kudos to the students of the Sha’ar Hanegev High School near Sderot, Israel, who are fighting to incorporate in their curricula a textbook that comprises both Israeli and Palestinian narratives.

The Education Ministry’s pedagogical secretariat, Zvi Zameret, banned the school from using the book Learning Each Other’s Historical Narrative.

For the students, the fact that the book holds Palestinian narratives does not necessarily herald a change in their views of the conflict.

Rather, it is the opportunity to challenge their perceptions that is being compromised:

[We want to] hear personally an explanation as to why we cannot use this book. We cannot understand the education ministry’s deep fear of this book, which presents two positions on the dispute, Israeli and Palestinian. The ministry’s claim that it has not given authorization is self-serving: It doesn’t have any intention to provide such authorization, and there isn’t any other book that provides the Palestinian version.The Education Ministry is showing cowardice. It does not want to change anything in history studies, lest, heaven forbid, we learn about values it opposes. [Source]

And I particularly like this pithy quip by the following student:

The Education Ministry apparently believes that if we learn the Palestinian narrative, we will think that the Palestinians are right. That demeans our intelligence, and it’s a little insulting to say we will believe anything we read. The same thing could be said about using Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf‘ in history lessons. It doesn’t work that way. [Source]

Sometimes it has to be conceded: the student really can be smarter than the teacher (or secretariat, in this instance).