Ethnocentric Education in NY

Seems my childhood experience growing up and receiving an education in the NYC public school system is nothing but a memory now. In the 60s, you went to the elementary and Junior High schools nearest your home. By high school, if you wanted to take a particular foreign language, nursing or other specialty trade, you could apply to a specific school. The system was fairly streamlined, my mother had absolutely no involvement other than 2-3 appearances at PTA meetings during elementary school years.

We had art lessons 3 times a week with a designated art teacher, we had music and orchestra 3 times a week and students had the option of coming earlier for extra music practice. We had dedicated and involved teachers, for the most part, there were plenty of weirdos...Mr. A who came to class with a bag of transistor radios, toys to give away just to get kids to sit still and listen to his grammar lessons. Or Mr. L. our frum science teacher who took some of the 14 year old girls aside (self included) for 'trips' in his car, making suggestive remarks. Or Ms. S., a frum young woman who kept ducking out of our room to see her fellow teacher down the hall and at the end of the year anounced they were engaged, waggling her ring for everyone to see. She taught us English or CORE as it was called then, we read and discussed poetry, literature, attempted to learn grammar and were given writing assignments.

Grammar was something never taught well or seriously or it just never penetrated...kinda like algebra. Math was a bytch. We learned to read using the old fashioned phoenics system, that was later tossed out for some new teaching method that has clearly failed because 2006 research shows that 40% of kids who are in NYC high schools are illiterate in math and english.

We were expected to come to school clean, dressed, with supplies and books. We were expected to do the homework we were assigned each day. Twice a week we had 'assembly' and the entire school piled into the auditorium where the flag was saluted and we 'pledged allegiance', we heard the reading of one Psalm (!) and Mrs. A sang a song, something she clearly practiced for church on Sundays. We sat through announcements of events, meetings or things to do with the school, sometimes students were recognized for special achievements. You were expected to sit at your desk, do your work and not open your mouth unless called on. Our teachers were mostly Jewish with a few Italian and Irish. Every teacher, even the ones who probably shouldnt have been around kids for a variety of reasons, worked their butts off, took time to talk, listen and get us to learn. Teachers also had a dress code that was tznius and appropriate for the role modeling and work they were doing.

I'm writing all this down because I'm reading, somewhat tangentially, about the structuring of the public school system. Schools appear to be 'smaller' and more self contained and locally supervised, but art, music and similar courses are now regarded as luxuries. Schools raise money for essentials like books and teaching supplies. Kids are crowded usually 40 in a class, in buildings that are not only dirty and in disrepair but in some cases falling apart.

Setting all this aside, how did we come to the point of having ethnocentric schools, in a public school system? Years ago bi-lingual teaching was the big thing because you couldnt burden or expect a child to 'give up' his language (Spanish was the only language that appeared to be an issue) and learn English if his parents only spoke their native language at home. And such kids were failing tests, so teach them in their native language and all would be well.

The school system has taken bi-lingual education another major step forward now and are offering ethnic immersion programs where students can select to attend a school that is 'chinese' or 'gay' in its orientation and perspectives. Being proposed and it to be looks like a shoe-in, is a middle school to teach the arab perspective. The Director of this proposed school, who claims she's of yemeni extraction, says its not a school for Islam, but the school WILL teach colonialism and the historical issues pertinent to arabs and will teach in arabic. There are schools already that exist to teach arabs, Al-Nour is a respected school in Brooklyn has been written about in the media. Arabs do not have to be religious to attend, arabic is taught, as are secular subjects. Al-Nour would probably love to expand and become a model of what arabic parents, teachers and students could accomplish.

Years ago, parents wanting targeted education accentuating one's family history as christians, jews etc. could opt to send their kids to either a Time Out program once a week, while remaining in public school, where kids could learn both religious and historical aspects of their religion or just send them to parochial schools. One usually learned about one's ethnic history from living and celebrating holidays with family. It was never the job of the public education system to teach a child how to be 'chinese' or 'arab' or 'gay' which is what the schools have set themselves up to do now.

One never hears the term 'melting pot' anymore, because it's probably considered politically incorrect, like corporal punishment, mentioning G-d in school in any manner, dress codes, or expecting teachers to actually role model and not act and dress like 'buddies.'

While we're distracted with the butchery in Darfur (where was everyone during the butchery in Rwanda?) and other non-jewish issues, in our own backyards, kids are attending schools we pay taxes for to immerse in cultures and perspectives of countries that have some of the worst human rights violations in religious, economic and gender abuses on record. The gay high school that opened 4 years ago in Manhattan on 8th and Broadway to great hoopla, was closed in '06 to due poor academic performance.

Islam does not differentiate between political and religious ambitions. Tell me how a child in NY, living in a muslim home or Copt home, will be taught the history of arab butchery, invasions and forced conversions and return home to families where fathers quite often have taken more than one wife, using the mosque network to marry polygamously 'off the books' while having the main wife on civil record to collect benefits--tell me how these configurations will be put into historical context for kids raised in a country where women are theoretically (!) not subjected to this kind of manipulation and abuse?

Will kids be taught one thing in school and laugh it all off when they get home and discuss it, if at all with their parents? Or have our schools been so corrupted by individuals and their political interests that what is taught, doesnt follow a curriculum that addresses children's long term needs, but rather, fosters the ignorance, economic issues and abuses their parents disdained in their own countries to run here, and now they've arrived, want to retain a schizophrenic lifestyle and demand the educational system help them do that?

The same ways in which middle east Arabs are learning that behind the cowboy swaggering is porous borders and liberal policies wanting to appease them and show them how wonderful democracy is, too many immigrants coming to America are learning how to spend their energies focusing on manipulating democratic loopholes and benefits solely to further their own self serving agendas.

What's to be seen, is whether such ethnocentric 'intellectual' indulgences will eventually harvest a generation of havoc (substitute terror if you like), so entrenched in our own society, that issues in the middle east will look, in hindsight, like child's play.