DALTON, Georgia/LONDON - Some schools in the United States see the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza as a teachable moment to instil the value of critical thinking, tolerance and empathy in students.

Others duck the subject, fearing backlash from their divided local communities.

In either case, schools in the US, and in Britain too, are largely on their own if they want to help students understand the war as it enters its sixth month.

In the US, there is little by way of guidance from the federal or state governments and it is up to the judgment of local school boards, administrators and teachers to figure out how to tackle the topic in social studies or world history classes, or current affairs clubs.

Ms Morgan Patel, a high school geography teacher with Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, coped by setting up ground rules to achieve the goal she set herself: a respectful conversation about the Israel-Hamas war.

“Try not to generalise your experience; you are an ‘I’, not a ‘we’” was one of her rules, meant to cool heads in a class that included Muslim, Arab, Jewish and Israeli students, who are aged between 14 and 17.

For Mr Joe Nappi, who was named New Jersey’s State Teacher of the Year in 2023, a key objective in his social studies class was to equip students to think critically about how to get accurate information on a topic that is many-sided.

“If we’re not going to give our students the skills and the resources and the context to try to make sense of this, then we’re kind of trusting them to figure it out on social media,” Mr Nappi, who teaches at Monmouth Regional High School, told ABC News.

Beyond having access to trustworthy information lies the challenge of building the trust to have an open-minded conversation about a polarising topic.

Ms Patel said that talking about the real-time Israel-Hamas war made her anxious, although she had had experience in teaching about bloody conflicts – like the partition of India and Pakistan.

“We’re not looking to choose sides here. We’re showing injustices that are happening on both sides,” she told Chalkbeat, a non-profit news organisation specialising in education reporting.

But it has not been easy for schools to remain impartial, even when that has been the intention.

Soon after Hamas’ Oct 7 attack in Israel that left 1,200 dead, according to Israeli tallies, New York City’s education officials committed to providing resources to facilitate discussions about the crisis and supporting students in being “compassionate global citizens”.

For instance, middle and high school principals in the district will get mandatory training in March on navigating difficult conversations, and more teaching materials will be made available on handling anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

Teachers ‘walking on eggshells’

That proved easier said than done in America’s biggest school district, which is home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. The city also houses one of the nation’s biggest Muslim communities. No pronouncement satisfied the groups of parents arrayed on opposite sides of the issue.

In Michigan, where Arab Americans make up a sizeable section of the population in some cities, a public school district made headlines in January when it issued a call for a bilateral ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

The call, probably the first to be made over an international conflict by a public school district, came after a stormy five-hour public meeting in the Ann Arbor school district where a petition opposing the call collected nearly 2,000 signatures. The meeting also called for teachers to “facilitate informed and respectful dialogue about the conflict”.

But Michigan has fared no better than New York in providing a curriculum at a time when public schools are already sites for divided opinions on racism and LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) bias.

“Teachers have been walking on eggshells,” as Ms Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, put it.

“They are not confident that if they engage in any of these discussions, that they’re going to be supported through it,” she told ABC News.

‘Absence of bias’ in instruction

The question of support assumes significance because education in the US is seen as a matter for states and local bodies to administer and meet community needs that could vary across regions.

While Singapore has taken a proactive stance in educating secondary school students about the conflict through specially designed character and citizenship education lessons, the US federal government is constitutionally bound to stay hands-off in these matters.

And even as Singapore’s Ministry of Education has drawn up the course material with inputs from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US State Department is not involved in providing guidance for American schools.

Decisions about curricula, standards and assessments are taken at the state and local district level. There is no scope for the federal government at all in this, officials from the US Department of Education and Department of State told The Straits Times.

But state governments also provide no direct guidance on teaching about the conflict. They require only the “absence of bias” in instruction.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights’ sole intervention came amid a spike in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents that led many schools to beef up security on campus.

This was limited to providing a reminder to schools that hate has no place in America’s classrooms.

But there is no doubt that the Biden administration’s evolving policy on the conflict has not made it any easier to answer questions that schools find themselves tackling.

Although US foreign policy has been traditionally pro-Israel for decades, President Joe Biden has tried to temper his initial support for Israel during an election year. He has since characterised Israel’s military action as being “over the top”.

But escalating Palestinian casualties – estimated at over 30,000 – and large protests by both Jewish and Arab American groups have caused opposing opinions to seep into classrooms and staffrooms.

Britain’s initial guidance

In Britain, too, many schools chose to opt out of discussing the topic rather than face accusations of supporting one side or the other.

The challenge has been particularly acute in cities such as London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester, where some schools have mostly Muslim students who are beginning to express strong feelings about the conflict.

Soon after the Oct 7 attack, British Education Secretary Gillian Keegan issued guidance to the nation’s schools “on how to respond to the Israel-Hamas conflict in the classroom”.

That initial guidance, prepared before the Israeli offensive in Gaza, concentrated on the casualties suffered by Israel rather than on the impact of the war on ordinary Palestinians.

Ms Keegan reminded teachers that “Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and it is illegal to encourage support for them”.

The British government’s guidance also warned teachers that “events in the Middle East are used as an excuse to stir up hatred against communities”, and told them that it was “of the utmost importance that schools and colleges tackle this head-on and ensure that where behaviour extends into anti-Semitism or other discriminatory bullying, it is responded to with all due seriousness”.

Here, too, mounting Palestinian deaths cause the British government’s initial advice to seem inappropriate. It seemed inadequate in helping schools deal with the anger and revulsion that swept through the country’s Muslim communities.

As a consequence, schools and educators have largely avoided debate on the topic.

One reason for this deafening silence is that teaching the politics of the Middle East in British schools has always been a controversial and neglected topic.

Only 2 per cent of students who sit the General Certificate of Secondary Education – a national qualification for those who decide to leave school without pursuing further academic study towards qualifications such as the A levels – at around 16 years old opt for the Middle East history module.

Pearson, the education publisher that produces what are now the only textbooks available for the course, was forced to withdraw two editions of its textbooks, once because Britain’s Jewish community complained Palestine was mentioned too much, and once because pro-Palestinian movements subsequently accused the publisher of pro-Israel bias.

Fear of controversies

Yet the most important reason for the absence of proper debate or teaching in British schools, as in the US, is the fear of attracting controversy.

The Observer, a British weekly newspaper that has investigated the topic, claims to have found that some British schools are actively resisting student interest in Gaza either because they fear the amount of “heat” such a debate can generate or because they are worried about “bad publicity”.

Filling the void created by this official neglect are some private initiatives such as charity organisation Parallel Histories, which offers two contradictory historical narratives on all major conflicts or controversies, allowing readers to make up their own minds.

Mr Michael Davies, the historian who set up the charity, claims that downloads of its Middle East material rose by more than 500 per cent after the outbreak of the war.

In the US, too, resources meant to further a more accurate or “alternative” understanding of history are offered by a number of independent organisations, such as the National Council for the Social Studies, the Zinn Education Project and the American Federation of Teachers.

As the Israel-Hamas war drags on, such sites look set to keep drawing thousands of new eyeballs.