Skip to main content

Because "Parents Are Concerned"

Image
By
In Mansfield, Texas, the school district won a grant to teach Arabic classes. Originally labeled as mandatory, the district has since backed down, dissembling that they are not, in fact, mandatory. Still, parent remain "concerned" that their children might be exposed to a language other than English. They fear that learning Arabic might somehow transform their children into Koran-reading Muslims; it's a marker of that fear that the district has made clear that teaching Arabic does not involve religious training.

The upset parents said that they should have been told months ago about the grant, to what end I'm not quite sure. Bigotry is on parade here, the irrational fear of the "Other."

America needs translators of Arabic, and also Mandarin Chinese, now more than it ever has, and such people are exactly what it does not have. If this country ceases to be great, it will be because of unfounded fears like this in Mansfield. We should not stop the important work of learning languages because a certain subset is afraid of languages other than English (the "speak English" or else mentality), religions other than Christianity, world views that are not their own.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 9, 2011 at 5:52 AM

    One 'concerned parent's' comment was priceless, although this is not a direct quote it is very close: "They won't let us teach Christianity in schools, but they can teach Islam. I don't want my child being taught how to speak Islam."

    This reminds me of a coversation overheard by my daughter and myself between two waitresses at a restaurant in Butler, PA, which resulted in my daughter having a look of disbelief on her face. One waitress replying to the other: It's all right, now that Barack Obama is president we'll all be speaking Muslim before you know it."

    This is of course wrong on more than one level, with Barack Obama not being a Muslim in the first place, and second there is no language called Muslim, or Islam.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Herla cyningFebruary 9, 2011 at 6:59 PM

    [chuckle, chuckle] How silly, foolish, short-sighted. Need I go on? "Was I there?" ;-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Unanswerable Questions" for Evolution Part One

By
Creation Ministries International has launched a new initiative, which seems a lot like all the other creationists blitzkriegs before it. With the wonderfully creative tagline of "Question Evolution", CMI intends to challenge "evolutionists" and their "indoctrination" of high school students with the supposed dogma of evolution. They also aim to  cut the population of atheists by half , presumably by challenging the "faith" that every atheist (and only atheists, no "real Christians") is supposed to hold in Darwin's great idea. The main thrust of this is a tract with fifteen "unanswerable" questions for evolutionists. I'm done putting quotation marks around the word, evolutionists; from here on out I ask my readers to recognize that it is a creationist term that is about as silly as calling someone a general relativist (accepts general relativity) or germist (for accepting germ theory). Regardless, CMI seems just as i...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Creationists Don't Understand

By
There are quite a number of concepts that one could successfully argue that creationists fail to understand; whether this is out of a simple lack of knowledge or willful ignorance is hard to say and certainly can't be generalized to every creationist. Some, the everyday creationist, I would like to think simply haven't been exposed to the evidence. Others, the holders of Ph.D's in various fields, especially in the sciences, who happily reject evolutionary theory are willfully ignorant (John Whitmore comes to mind). But I think there is one idea that creationists of all stripes simply fail to understand; evolution is based on solid, visible evidence. Evolution is not some tenant of a "science religion" that descended down to Darwin from on high, it is an explanatory framework based on quite a lot of facts and mountains of evidence. It is evidence that leads to the conclusions of evolution, that life changes over time and, given the long history of the earth, all ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Absurdity/Agony of War

By
Science writer Mary Roach is never one to shy away from parts of science that verge on the absurd, as anyone who has read any of her books surely knows. I'd read two of her previous books, and been enchanted enough by Roach's unique combination of endless curiosity and a wry sense of humor that I rushed to lay my hands on her newest book. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War will not fail in living up to the expectations that fans of her work will bring. Those who have never read her before will be hard-pressed to put down a book that I finished in a few short days.  The real joy of reading something by Mary Roach is her talent for seeking out strange areas of science that a reader might never have known about. As an investigator, she answers questions you never knew you had. Her newest work   is no exception. We discover, for instance, how the military tests the ability of a fighter jet to survive a mid-air collision with a large bird--by firing a dead chicken...
Post a Comment
Read more