Oct 4, 2007 3:12 PM
It’s not the T-shirts suggesting Intifada and New York City should be connected in some way. It’s not the former principal’s suggestion that such cheery shirts should be seen as a form of self-expression, an attempt to “shake off” oppression. It’s not the teaching of the Arabic languages in a public school, nor the teaching of Muslim history and culture.
But there is a problem. It is the folly of creating a school to ease alleged establishment ignorance and guilt. It is the educational community’s mindset that schools should do other than educate and socialize our young.
The creation of the Khalil Gibran International Academy represents the nadir in the decline of good thinking about education in our city. This school is part of the march to absurdity, waste and mindlessness that has now passed through elementary schools into our middle and high schools.
The way we think about education is so warped that someone decided to create a small middle school/high school run by an inexperienced educator with no administrative or teaching experience on a high school level. Dhabah Almontaser taught in elementary school for a period of time and then became a political activist for Muslim causes. At no time in the history of free, public education would her pedigree suggest that this woman should be the leader of an urban, public middle or high school.
Only in an education world sinking into the sea, where 25-year-olds with two or three years of teaching experience enter magical leadership academies and come out fake principals, could an Almontaser and the Gibran Academy be promoted as viable educational alternatives. We must now ask, “Where have we gone wrong?” and “What is the purpose of public education?”
The last few desperate years have seen the small- school movement hit New York City. Millions of dollars have been spent to close large high schools and open small ones. The movement has a religious zeal to it, but does it promote a worthy idea?
Almost anyone with a brainstorm for a boutique high school and persistence in driving a proposal can become principal of a new school. My alma mater, Tilden HS in Brooklyn, is being chopped up and will contain a high school run by the Outward Bound organization.
There are high schools with all sorts of themes: sports careers, law, finance, creative writing, engineering, international studies, basket weaving and hygiene. (Well, not the last two!) Shouldn’t the only themes in education be behaving appropriately and learning a broad curriculum to the best of one’s ability?
Public education is here to offer every child a basic education, academic skills, sometimes vocational skills, an exposure to readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic. Children of the poor and wealthy, children from assimilated and immigrant homes, all may come and see the light or not.
We hope that from out of this diverse group may come our scholars and our leaders. Mark Twain said that the strength of our nation is in our public schools. What would he say now? Perhaps he would jump on board and propose the Mark Twain School of River Boating, Fence Painting and Collective Guilt about Slavery.
Are we to tailor education to satisfy every constituency or are we to offer a solid, uniform, academic bundle to all? Certainly the time is right to offer Arabic languages in public high schools. But should we devote an entire high school to these languages and cultures? Should a group of 6th- to 12th-graders study these subjects in depth to make up for some sense of American insensitivity? There is no real, worthwhile theory of public education that sustains this choice.
We must leave for another time the exploration of whether or not Almontaser was equipped to present an unbiased, balanced study of the Middle East. Would her school teach a slanted Arab view of the Middle East or counter that with a Western view and the opinions of Muslim critics such as Farid Ghadry and Fouad Ajami?
If you do not buy my point of view and are enamored of the small-school movement, well then, being flexible, I now propose my boutique high school to promote respect for my special-interest group — The High School for Plumpness in Middle Age.