Posted on 05/28/2012 4:29:17 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
An upper Manhattan public elementary school will be the first in the city to require that students study Arabic, officials said last week.
Beginning next semester, all 200 second-through fifth-graders at PS 368 in Hamilton Heights will be taught the language twice a week for 45 minutes, putting it on equal footing with science and music courses, The New York Post reported.
Principal Nicky Kram Rosen said that she selected Arabic, as opposed to more common offerings, such as Spanish or French, is because it will help the school obtain a more prestigious degree standing.
“She proposed this to the parent association. They were very supportive,” said Angela Jackson, CEO of the Global Language Project, which is backing the initiative.
“Arabic has been identified as a critical-need language,” she said, citing students’ future “career trajectories.’’
“It means they can spin the globe and decide where they want to work and live.”
Students now taking the class in a pilot program during their free afternoon periods, said it has been a reward as well as a challenge.
“I like Arabic class. I like the words we learn. I thought they sounded funny at first, now I think they sound cool,” said Nayanti Brown, a 7-year-old second-grader. “I teach my little sister the words I learn.’’
“When I gave my mom the [permission slip] to sign, she was shocked. [Now] she’s happy I’m in the class,” she said.
The Arabic requirement becomes mandatory at PS 368 in September. However, because it is a so-called “choice’’ school, no students, not even those living nearby, are forced to attend. If the school enrolls a student who objects to learning Arabic, administrators will handle that on a case-by-case basis, Jackson said.
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
Soon it will be Spanish. Then Chinese, The Russian.
Public school in NYC to teach Arabic? For the first time ever, I feel sorry for the Muslim indoctrinators.
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Shouldn't decisions made by schools be ones based on helping the students?
kayf an tufakkira alaa shay’in saghirin kathaalik?
(How would she think of such a minor consideration like that?)
They’re going to teach Arabic to a bunch of kids who can’t speak or write English.
I read somewhere else that this is a charter school, so parents do have a choice about sending their kids there (or not). I also read that the school was trying to follow an International Baccalaureate curriculum, which traces its origins back to UNESCO. One more reason to homeschool or private school, if you ask me!
You make good points. But the basic idea of having Americans learn Arabic is not a bad one. We need to know what our enemies are saying and doing. It’s like studying Russian during the cold war.
You’d think a Jew would not be subjecting students to the to possible indoctrination into a negative value culture. The language is the gateway to many evils.
Right!
As long as "where they want to work and live" is in the Middle East (the only place I am aware of that the Arabic Language is practiced)....
....AND as long as they are "males" (females are not part of the workforce in most Arabic Countries) and are NOT Jews or Christians as they are not very welcomed in those same countries, which are ALL Islamic Republics.
Typical PC, Multiculturalist, Moonbats who are more concerned with symbolism over substance.
While I don't know much about Arabic, I understand it is a very difficult language to master and in order to be proficient one more than likely has to have been raised in an Arabic speaking family or country.
I speak from experience having grown up speaking, reading and writing French and assigned to Vietnam as a Linguist as well as having tried to learn Japanese and Vietnamese while living in both those countries without ever advancing much beyond being able to understand some words and speaking some sentences.
But the age to start is not seven years old. At seven, a kid is lucky to be literate in English at grade level. Suddenly, he’s going to start learning an entirely different phonetic system, with sounds that are completely undreamed of in English, with an alphabet that runs in the opposite direction, has at least two forms for each letter, depending if it’s at the beginning, middle or end of a word, and all sorts of idiosyncratic special combinations?
Sure we ought to know the language of our enemy, but first let the poor kids master English and get firmly grounded in it, and learn a related language, such as French, Latin or German, which will reenforce that grounding in English.
Leaping so suddenly into such deep waters will not help them learn Arabic, just encourage them to give up on learning anything, unless the child is exceptionally gifted. And for exceptionally gifted kids, Arabic might be just the thing, but not as a mandatory language starting in second grade. I have a son in third grade, and he speaks with a lisp worthy of Elmer Fudd in both Hebrew and English. Arabs are his enemies, but it would be premature to start him on Arabic.
Maybe i’m cynical-but could there be an agenda at play here?Teach young(impressionable)children arabic and then use it as a means to promote islam?
The language of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our State and Municipal laws is English, period. The language of our nation is English.
There is not room for any other language, especially that, of those who have been defined as enemy Combatants, in The War on Terror.
And the truly amazing thing is that the “Reform” and “Conservative” Jewish parents will be absolutely thrilled by this decision.The Orthodox parents,however,just might have a different attitude.
One of the most crippling things we face in trying to overcome Islamofascist terrorism, is that we do not have enough non-muslim speakers “with no bias, no skin in the game” to translate arabic and other languages, and that slows down our intel work considerably.
Just like the Muslim religion ... it’s mandatory and you can’t resign under the penalty of death. What it really says is that the Arabic language is so unpopular that no one will take it unless forced and they have an Arabic language teacher who is otherwise unemployable and probably closely related to someone high up in the school. Want to take Spanish, German, French or any other civilized language at the school and you are out of luck.
I took Arabic voluntarily, way back in the day. It’s a poetic language with a rich vocabulary, but really bizarre phonetics. It also has a very weak sense of time, with only a perfect and imperfect tense, and a jury-rigged future tense made by attaching a prefix to the imperfect, which is why Mad Mo mistakenly believed that Miriam sister of Moses was the same as Miriam mother of Jesus. It also has a chaotic system for plural nouns, an indicative subjunctive, jusive and imperative mood for verbs, but no optative, acusative, gentive and nominative inflection of nouns, but no dative or vocative.
Ancient Greek, in contrast, has a very sophisticated set of tenses, differentiating between continuous actions and one-time actions, present, past and future, a complete complement of inflections and moods, and a similarly poetic and rich vocabulary.
Not surprisingly, these missing pieces of grammatical tools are reflected in a corresponding deficit in thinking, which is why westerners at critical times displayed the mental flexibility that has eluded Arabs, and progressed while Arabs have stagnated. Alexander spread western culture and the Greek language, and with it a flexible way of thinking and acting. Mad Mo spread Arabic culture and language, and with it a cultural stagnation that is inescapable. Greeks cut Gordion knots. Arabs manufacture them and imprison themselves within the net they create.
I would either pull my kids or tell them to “abstain”
The bigger problem is that the only ‘English’ they seem to speak is EBONICS.
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