A new public secondary school, Khalil Gibran International Academy, is about to be founded in Brooklyn. One rationale offered in support of it is that the country needs more Arabic speakers. As Dan Pipes points out, however, Arabic instruction is laden with Islamist and Arabist associations and injunctions, for example,

at the collegiate level, see “Middlebury’s Arabic Morass” by Franck Salameh. For the heavy ideological freight that Arabic instruction carries, see “Does Learning Arabic Prevent Moral Decay?” where one learns that some Muslims believe “Knowledge of Arabic can then help the Western countries recover from the present moral decay.”

The establishment of any Arabic-language school should therefore receive careful review and be subject to rigorous controls. In the present case, given the aura of political correctness surrounding it, this is a virtual impossibility.

This school, with its ethnocentric focus, and which will in practice serve mainly students of Arab background, is also is certain to fail to provide the education such students need, namely, education that assimilates them into our common American culture. Andrew Wolf rightly denounces the “particularist” orientation of such a school as “un-American” and as a “Balkanization” of American education that “caters to every culture but our own.”

Our educational institutions at all levels should be teaching the oneness of American culture – “out of many, one,” as Wolf concludes. Because the Khalil Gibran school will not be geared to this end, we should oppose its establishment.