Public school for Muslims

The principal of New York City’s first public school dedicated to the study of Arabic language and culture resigned under pressure yesterday, days after she was quoted defending the use of the word “intifada” as a T-shirt slogan. [NYT]

Why are my tax dollars paying for this school?

Comments

[nobody]

It is only to point out that there are publicly funded Hebrew school as well. For example, Ben Gamla Charter School in MN.

http://www.bengamlacharter.org/

Is HS okay with this?

[Mark]

All public schools are theft of private money. This just illustrates the problem, so I am glad there is such an idiocy as a Muslim (or Hebrew, or gay) school. Maybe the knuckleheads who support gov't will catch on.

[Half Sigma]

Mark: "All public schools are theft of private money."

An example of whacko loonie libertarianism.

[APH]

"Why are my tax dollars paying for this school?"

The average NYC student is already dumb as dogshit...The fact that millions are wasted on such academic underachievers is the real crime. I wish they would close up half the high schools; maybe convert some to trade schools.

[Spungen]

I love that photo. Makes you look like Peter Lorre.

[Tony]

I say shut these places down. They only seek to create division in countries that promote diversity.

We have these types of schools in Australia and they do nothing but create problems. Two ideologies sitting side by side do not work. Islamic beliefs belong in the middle ages..

[Gil]

A Capitalist buys the noose that hangs hims and a Socialist get taxed the money for a noose which provides a free subsidy to some hard-done-by angry minority who wants to go a-hanging?

[Andrew Yates]

APH: The fact that millions are wasted on such academic underachievers is the real crime. I wish they would close up half the high schools; maybe convert some to trade schools.

So your solution to education is... shut down schools?

I don't understand what you people are thinking. The biggest threat to liberal society is "the masses." As far as I can think at 3am, there are three ways to govern masses or risk massive social failure:

1) kill them
2) prevent more from being born / immigrating
3) educate them

Explain to me how replacing schools that hypothetically are teaching children literacy, mathematics, and social skills needed to understand and participate in modern society with manual labor achieves any of these.

[Jim Beam]

Isn't there an "all gay public high school" somewhere in Manhattan that opened up about 5 years ago? It was in the spotlight a few years ago because some of the students were dressing up as prostitutes and robbing patrons at knife point.

[Peter]

Andrew Yates -

While educating "the masses" may be an important goal in theory, in practice they're not being particularly well educated by our current system. Many of the students in certain public school systems simply don't have the ability to thrive in a more academically oriented environment and would be better served by quality vocational education.

[political principles]

Since HS lacks the principled understanding that taking money from parents to provide a "public" education is wrong (since it takes away money that parents would be able to invest more efficiently and directly to their children's education), I'm not sure why he should be crying about this. It's a grand example of special interests hogging the monkey bars in an unconstrained government playground - and it's what you advocate.

[K]

Compulsory school attendance and taxation are valid issues, but not really the ones raised by this issue.

I think the issue is a bit more fundamental: Freedom of religion was a major impetus for the foundation of the United States of America. American's ethnic grandparents may be Italian, Polish, Korean, Irish, or German, but his INTELLECTUAL ancestors have a nice mix of Puritan, Quaker, and Congregationalist.

In that tradition of religious liberty, our society seems to (eventually) found a way to get Athiests, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Buddists, etc. to live fairly harmoniously. We've even made room for groups such as the Amish who are separatist and anti-statist, yet non-revolutionary.

But what can we do with large groups of Muslims? Surveys show that shockingly large percentages of American Muslims would like Sharia law to be imposed, and, while *most* Muslims in the West may be peaceful, why does it seem almost impossible to gather 1,000 Western Muslims together without having at least 5-7 who support violent destruction of our society?

Can anyone honestly refute the assertion that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the intellectual traditions of the United States? But isn't admitting this somehow incompatible with freedom of religion, one of our society's earliest and most fundamental precepts?

[Mark]

HS not only lacks the intellectual capacity to see that forcing people to pay for other people's children's education is wrong, he also lacks the moral capacity to see that it is wrong.

[Gil]

In the ho-hum serious department a good question for modern society is how many people are over-educated? Which is to say where a worker has quite a bit more skills than required for the type of job he/she is in? Another question is how many ho-hum jobs are out there that don't really need much education to get into? If you have basic literacy and numeracy you're pretty right to work in most working-class jobs, er, right? What real education do you need to flip burgers or stack crates? Maybe a hidden fact of life may be that a large portion of the job market don't require any more than a primary school education. Maybe compulsory public secondary education should be scrapped then?

[dearieme]

"Freedom of religion was a major impetus for the foundation of the United States of America." That can't be right: the 13 colonies already had freedom of religion.

[K]

Cute observation, dearieme.

Are you disagreeing that freedom of religion is an important American value which was valued by the colonists and later the revolutionaries?

[SFG]

That wasn't the reason the country was founded per se; they wanted to run their own affairs without interference from the Crown.

That said, quite a few of the original colonies were founded by religious objectors; the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Pennsylvania, etc.

[APH]

"Explain to me how replacing schools that hypothetically are teaching children literacy, mathematics, and social skills needed to understand and participate in modern society with manual labor achieves any of these."

I don't claim to have any brilliant answers, but 1) if a majority of the students at the HS level are seriously underperforming and 2) there's no revolutionary changes on the horizon in terms of changing the curriculum/the teacher's unions/individual and cultural attitude towards education - then I see little point in going through the motions and the formalities of HS. It's extremely expensive to educate a NYC student and the results speak for themselves... I don't see it as that unreasonable to switch gears and prepare a couple hundred thousand students for trade jobs and skilled labor - especially the boys. The college path is a a distraction and a waste of time and money.

PS - I once had a tech job for NYC's DOE DIIT - There really are hundreds of thousands of failing or close-to-failing students in the city...The status quo is not exactly preparing these kids for the "knowledge economy"...

[David Alexander]

"Explain to me how replacing schools that hypothetically are teaching children literacy, mathematics, and social skills needed to understand and participate in modern society with manual labor achieves any of these."

Amongst certain circles of people, there's a feeling that if we teach these people as if they were smart, they'll magically pick up on it eventually, and they'll become just as smart and productive, and they'll become good, hard-working *white-collar* employees with nice middle class families.

The college path is a a distraction and a waste of time and money.

The problem is that the college path is the only way these children, particularly the men, will ever get any respect from white society. Otherwise, they'll always be niggers to be looked down upon by the middle and upper classes who do have college degrees.

Besides, where are the trade jobs and skilled labour positions going to magically appear? Factory jobs that pay well have disappeared and have moved off overseas or down South, and the few well paying positions are locked up by guidos in mob-run companies.

The status quo is not exactly preparing these kids for the "knowledge economy"...

That's the problem. In our economy, the only positions that pay well and have a degree of respect are those that are at the centre of the knowledge economy. These kids will be ill equipped in any form to compete, and their labour costs are too high when overseas workers can do just as well for less money. In effect, Andrew Yates first two options seems to be the best course of action to dealing with this group.

[APH]

Well let me restate my point in different language...If your SAT score is below 950, you shouldn't be in any college PERIOD. That's my contention, at least. Now with that in mind, let's consider that there are dozens of high schools in NYC (and hundreds or thousands nationwide) where the average SAT score falls between 650 and 815. These scores are misleading and inflated to an extent - the real dumb kids drop out of school or don't bother taking the SAT - and in these schools, the population that fits those criteria can be as much as 50 - 75% of a class. If your SAT score is below 800 and you were given a HS diploma, you should consider yourself lucky because you probably can't read at a 12th grade level and basic algebra kicks your ass.

It's not an efficient use of money to prop up schools where 90%+ of the students "graduate" so pathetically equipped for the knowledge economy. Wishing it weren't so will not change reality. So let's review Andrew Yates options:

1) kill them
2) prevent more from being born / immigrating
3) educate them

1) Kill them: Well I sure hope this one is a sick joke...Let's cross this one off the list
2) Prevent more from being born/immigrating: I don't know how to prevent them from being born and not entirely comfortable with the ethical implications of disincentivizing birth; Immigration - Yes, I am in favor of drastically reducing immigration, screening, etc...The last thing we need is more mini-LAUSDs cropping up around the country...
3) Educate them - Well I suppose this one is rhetorical. But seriously - unless there is some paradigm shift in how we educate the kids from these schools, we are just throwing money down the drain. 12+ years of formal education, $150,000 spent and what do we get? Kids that can't read well, can't speak well, can't get beyond geometry in math, beyond "earth science" in science, have virtually no grasp of US history, no appreciation for Western civilization, etc...

These kids failed themselves or the system failed them (or some combination) - If public money is going to be spent on them, a more practical use would be to stop wasting it on the traditional educational approach and start spending it on training programs that are more likely to kick start productive employment.

[Mark]

APH et al.,
There is no "we". That many people are unprepared for modern life is absolutely not my problem. It is their and their parents' problem only. Grow up and realize that human beings are individuals and others don't have a right to decide what is best them.

[APH]

It is very much your problem whether you want it to be or not. You pay taxes, you live in a society, etc... What to do with a large population of underachieving youth affects a lot of things - where people live (and don't live), immigration, crime, future health care costs...We don't live in bubbles and even those who live in gated communities are still affected in the wallet because we are all subsidizing society's worst performers...

[David Alexander]

Kids that can't read well, can't speak well, can't get beyond geometry in math, beyond "earth science" in science, have virtually no grasp of US history, no appreciation for Western civilization, etc...

Hey, I went to private school with white students, and god knows how many failed or barely passed Earth Science...

These kids failed themselves or the system failed them (or some combination) - If public money is going to be spent on them, a more practical use would be to stop wasting it on the traditional educational approach and start spending it on training programs that are more likely to kick start productive employment.

The problem is that there really isn't much for them to do once they are trained as well. Industrial work en mass has fled the country, and what ever skilled work is left is in the hands of guidos who from what I've seen want nothing to do with minority labour. Even if we were to cut off immigration severely, employers would do anything to avoid employing native-born minority labour. Either the pay would go up to attract white males, or the work would be done by machine or go overseas. Minority native born labour is just simply undesirable for most employers as it's low quality, unreliable, and too expensive when compared to immigrant, overseas outsourced (or insourced) labour.

Also, socially, it still doesn't improve their social ranking vis à vis whites either. It just makes minorities employed dirty blue collar labourers, in contrast to "proper" white collar workers.