Foehammer’s Anvil

“Being that we are a public school, we certainly are not going to be teaching religion,” said Almontaser, 39. “Islam does not have a culture. Islam is a religion.” She said the school won’t shy away from sensitive topics such as colonialism and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. “Teachers are going to be expected to provide students with multiple perspectives on whatever the issue is,” Almontaser said. “Students will, through the critical-thinking skills that they will develop, make informed decisions on the perspective that they want to believe.”

That’s a quote from Dhabah ( “Debbie”) Almontaser, principal-designate of New York City’s Khalil Gibran International Academy.

A new public secondary school that is to include Middle Eastern studies in its curriculum will focus on culture, not the region’s political conflicts, Department of Education officials said yesterday. “The school will not be a vehicle for political ideology,” a Department of Education spokesman, David Cantor, said of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, due to open this September in Brooklyn.

As for the sorts of topics the school will cover, the CEO of the Office of New Schools, Garth Harries, gave as an example a math lesson plan that would mention that an Arabic mathematician invented the concept of zero. “It’s going to follow Department of Education regulations,” the director of the Arab-American Family Support Center, Lena Alhusseini, who helped design the school, said. “It’s going to be exactly like all the schools in the city, the same curriculum.”

That would be all well-and-good, but it sets a very bad precedent already to make false claims: “Zero was an Indian invention that the Arabs adopted.”

You can read much more, with updates, at Daniel Pipes’ Weblog. Daniel Pipes will appear live on �Fox News Live,� at 11:45 a.m., EDT, today, Wednesday, April 18th. He will discuss these plans of the New York City’s Department of Education to establish an Arabic-language school in the fall.

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