Under Hamas, No More Coed Classes in Gaza
A community of animals elects its new king. The candidates are a wily green crocodile who makes grandiose promises and a yellow lion whose father was the previous king. In the end, the lion is too confident that he will win and loses the elections to the mendacious crocodile. An Election Day in the Sabana is a children's book that has disappeared from Gaza's libraries over the past few years. Given the crocodile's demise at the close of the book, it's unsurprising that Gaza's Hamas government seems unable to appreciate the story.
Removing the tale of the crocodile's rise and fall from the curriculum is just one part of Hamas' recent efforts to consolidate its power over education in the Gaza Strip. Although the group came to power in 2006 through elections widely acknowledged as democratic, its recent infiltration of Gaza's institutions has been anything but free and fair.
In early April the Gaza-based Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) voted in Educational Law No. 1/2013, provoking debate because the law was only ratified by members of Hamas' Change and Reform bloc, which did not actually have a legal majority in the Council. The new law will come into force at the beginning of the next school year, and contains two particularly controversial articles.
Article 42 mandates gender segregation in all Gazan schools, stipulating that "boys and girls must be in separate classes in educational institutions after the age of nine." Under Article 47 of the new law, men will be banned from teaching at girls' schools. Gaza's universities are already segregated by gender, but the new law means that these policies will be implemented in all primary, secondary, and private schools.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/05/under-hamas-no-more-coed-classes-in-gaza/276163/
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