More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Taliban has been establishing religious schools all over Afghanistan. This cannot be a substitute for women’s education, nor a reason for the Taliban to gain international acceptance. These religious schools de-prioritize traditional subjects. By focusing on an education that closes off the outside world, Afghan students are being excluded from public life. This is unacceptable.
Compromising modern education means compromising the future of Afghanistan and the global community.
Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Lincoln, Roosevelt, King, Kennedy and Reagan each played critical roles in the history of our country and remain household names. Yet what of Murray, Chisholm, Eastman, Stone and Stanton? These women contributed greatly to the success of America, yet remain largely unknown to most Americans, including high school students.
We are advocating to change this. As AP history students and educators, we propose the creation of a standalone AP United States Women’s History course. The youth of America are entitled to these stories traditionally left untold: the history of 50 percent of our population, who are currently a mere sidebar of token inclusion within a generic textbook on men’s history.
Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. And each year, we review our monthly Reads for the Rest of Us lists and choose our favorite books of the entire year.
You’ve read the other “Best of” lists—now read the other one. You know, for the rest of us. So here they are, our book critic’s top 38, in alphabetical order.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has traveled across the country on a “Road to Healing” tour to hear the stories of Indigenous survivors of the federal Indian boarding school system and connect communities with trauma-informed support.
“I know that this process will be long and difficult,” said Haaland. “I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”
Since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghan people—especially women and girls—have lived under harsh edicts and orders. Yet a U.N. assessment released last month does not mention the Taliban by name once. Although it describes the issue of women’s rights critically, it does not make any recommendations concerning women’s rights—except to say the current system violates the U.N. Convention to Eliminate Sex Discrimination. Incredibly vague phrasing sums up the overall message of the report.
The United Nations’ commitment to ending gender apartheid must not waver.
I’ve been a clerk, teacher and administrator in Volusia County, Fla., schools for decades. Our 9-year-old grandson will no longer be educated here.
Last school year, one like no other, I kept a journal because the laws coming down from Tallahassee and the school board meetings I regularly attend had become frightening. I knew the effects in the schools would be equally scary. They were worse than I imagined.
To help end world hunger, we must commit to a strategy that for too long has been ignored by global and U.S. leaders: Level the playing field for women and girls.
Lawmakers are barring the education of, or exposure to, an understanding of the purposes and catalysts for the civil rights movement and the lasting impacts of white supremacy and white superiority by insisting on revisionist history and outright elimination of teaching facts in schools.
As Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reminded us on the anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, “The uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves.”
The world is not confined to Israel and Palestine, and it should be possible to give that conflict the attention and outrage it deserves—which is a lot—while not treating other people as trivial or disposable because they happen to live in places that are not as geopolitically relevant to U.S. interests, or are not as psychologically or biologically tied to as many Americans and Europeans, or are not as connected to the American and European telling of history.
It does not have to be this way. We do not have to turn our eyes away.
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) are creating a movement to implement accurate and culturally representative curricula in public schools. The majority of Ohioans want this education—and we see this desire echoed nationally: In Illinois, we saw the historic passage of the TEAACH Act in 2021. Similar legislation was passed in New Jersey and Connecticut in 2022, showing a need and desire for inclusive curricula across the country. These education bills encompass a wide array of identities and histories.
We understand that our histories and our futures are tied to one another. This is the core of the AAPI curriculum movement.
