related to the English primary and secondary educational system:

For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils. In another department, teachers were strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination. In another history department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils, but the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 because their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques.

Appalling. I would caution against drawing much by way of general inferences about the English educational system from this, since there will inevitably be bad apples in every large system, and the report doesn't purport to measure the incidence of this sort of behavior. Still, even one such incident is troubling, and merits closer looking into; I do hope the English education establishment is taking this seriously.

Here's the BBC coverage of the report. Thanks to Clayton Cramer for the pointer.

A commenter on the thread about the UK schools that "avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils" and "deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 because their balanced treatment of the topic would have directly challenged what was taught in some local mosques" writes:

Are these schools being oversensitive out of mere PC, or out of a fear (justified or not) of violent reprisals from Muslims? That is a big distinction that neither the BBC article nor Cramer's blog explores. (Keep in mind that during the height of the "Motoons" controversy, some newspapers not only refused to publish the cartoons, but openly admitted that they only did so out of fear of a violent backlash.) If the schools have reason to believe that teaching certain things might provoke violent responses from certain quarters, they might reasonably make student and faculty safety the higher priority than a "fair and balanced" curriculum.

If that's the case, it's sad that events in the UK have reached the point where schools are forced to make such choices.

1. If indeed events in the UK have reached the point where schools fear violence from Muslim students not just for displaying the Mohammed cartoons, but for teaching about the Holocaust, and teaching in a balanced way about the Crusades, then how do we unreach that point? I somehow don't think that paying the Dane-geld is the way to deal with the situation, especially when you're trying to teach a new generation, both of Muslim Britons and non-Muslim ones. Maximizing short-term student and teacher safety by taking steps that dramatically undermine long-term national safety (as well as undermining educational quality) is not, I think, "reasonabl[e]."

2. As best I could tell from the report, there is no reason to think that the schools were indeed afraid about "violent responses"; they just didn't want to irritate students and parents, and to create classroom discussions that would require them to publicly condemn certain sentiments on the students' parts. I saw no evidence that talk of the Holocaust, or even a balanced presentation of the Crusade, was really seen as likely to provoke violent reactions. So even if you are eager to surrender to threatened violence, is it too much to ask for at least some evidence that violence is indeed being threatened?