Like a loyal party apparatchik, Comrade Ducey, our Governor, the man in charge, is worried about what our children are being taught. He wishes to mandate the teaching of the holocaust and 9/11. This is interesting. Those on the education boards vetting the curriculum and the teachers cannot be trusted in his view so a few legislative shoves in the right direction are required. Does Ducey's concern indicate his own feelings that he could have learned more about these two events? And why just these two events? Why does he not mandate teaching about our invasion of our neighbor Mexico in 1846 which brought about Arizona or the Indian Wars when we defeated Geronimo, or westward colonial expansion or the effects of slavery or The Massacre at Wounded Knee? Shouldn't climate change be on the curriculum so that our students know what a tipping point is, what carbon dioxide is and does, or how pandemics and vaccination work or the effects of severe water shortages in the Colorado River basin? They might find these very useful in their lives in the future!

We have no idea what Ducey wants the students to learn about 9/11. It could be valuable for them to know the differences between the Shiite and Sunni interpretations of the Koran or the rise of Wahhabism. After all President Bush didn't know anything about those subjects. Should we honestly be telling out children how the war on terror was exacerbated by our subsequent invasions of two peripherally connected, poor Arab countries after 9/11, rather than attack the oil rich country whose citizens executed the plan but which buys alot of arms from us? Should we teach them that we ignored the first attack on the World Trade Center, that the attack which brought down the towers could easily have been prevented because the government had been warned several times? Should we tell them that we trained the pilots who flew into the twin towers here in Arizona and that the money to pay for that came from Saudi Arabia?

When we teach the holocaust are we going to ensure our students understand that it came about because a populist leader rose to power by stoking the fires of hatred against one section of the population and got his supporters to burn down the Parliament building, then used the military to cement his grip on power, promising to make the country great again after WWI? These are questions Governor Ducey should answer. We like to think of ourselves as a free country with people who can handle the truth but countries invariably write their history from their own perspective. Japanese children learn about the dropping on the H Bomb on Hiroshima but do not learn about the Massacre of Nanking or that starving Japanese soldiers ate American pilots live. We don't teach children that our GIs collected the ears of the VietCong to validate their body count. If Ducey wants to make sure our children learn only a sanitized version of history, a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin version of events where well meaning white owners loved their happy slaves and didn't keep them in check with horrifying industrial age instruments of torture or that we recently used waterboarding as an instrument of policy and imprisoned people without trial in the war against Al Qaeda? Do we show our children pictures of Abu Ghraib? If we don't, it all amounts to propaganda, the type of propaganda that the Chinese Communist Party and the North Korean leadership use so successfully to keep their own people under tight control.

I think we need to know more about what precisely Governor Ducey wants to teach our children about these two events. It would be nice to hear from our educators who have to carry out Chairman Ducey's plans. Perhaps he could put his thoughts down in a little red book to give to each child!