The New York City Education Department has announced plans to create a public school in Brooklyn called the Khalil Gibran International Academy, devoted solely to Arabic culture and language. This is a mistake. Such a school violates the very purpose of public education, which is to teach the ideas, traditions, values, knowledge and skills that young people need to become productive members of American society.
There is no question that our nation needs more people who can read and speak Arabic. This is a good reason to establish Arabic classes in public high schools. But it is not a reason to create a school that is centered entirely on Arabic studies.
Supporters say that there are already public schools where students focus on a single foreign language and culture. They condemn critics of the Arabic school as bigots.
I don’t agree. In my view, there should be no public schools where all instruction is based on only one non-English culture and language. A few such schools were created at a time when advocates of ethnic studies thought that public schools should raise children’s self-esteem by teaching them to have pride in their cultural heritage. These schools naturally tend to celebrate the culture on which the entire school is focused.
There is nothing wrong with preserving one’s cultural heritage. But this is not the appropriate role for public schools. If parents want their children to attend schools that teach their children to take pride in their race, their ethnicity, their religion and their ancestral culture, they should enroll them in private schools or private after-school programs.
Our city contains immigrants from every nation in the world, who speak many different languages. If we were to create special schools for each group that wants to preserve its cultural heritage, it would be the end of the historic ideal of public education as a common training ground for future citizens.
The American public school is supported by public tax dollars because it has an important role in American society. It is the one institution that is supposed to teach children to think critically about the world they live in and at the same time to prepare them to take responsibility as American citizens. The founders of American public education knew that our democratic experiment would survive only if the people were educated enough to participate in our democracy and to select wise leaders.
Thus, we want our children to learn mathematics and science, history and civics, literature and the arts. We want them to learn about our institutions so that they can become involved in the important business of improving them. We want them to learn about American culture and also about the history and cultures of many other nations. Ideally, all children should learn a second language.
So, yes, let us insist that our public schools teach foreign languages, including Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French and German. While they are learning foreign languages, let them share classes and activities with students whose interests are very different from their own.
But, above all, let us not create public schools that separate our students into ethnic and cultural enclaves. That way betrays the purpose of public education.
Ravitch is author of “The Great School Wars,” a history of the city’s public schools, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution in Washington.
