Anyone who remembers the epic parochial-school wars of the 70’s and 80’s cannot but stand in stunned amazement as the saga of the Khalil Gibran Academy unfolds. In those days, federally funded remedial math and reading were required to be provided to yeshiva students in vans parked outside their yeshivas so as to avoid even the possibility that anyone would think public money was being used in any way to promote the overall mission of the religious school. This despite the fact that all students were entitled to such remediation simply because they were students.
Things have changed somewhat since then, but the residual notion still obtains that students who receive their secular education in a religious setting are somehow disabled – pariah-like – from receiving the equivalent of what students who get their secular education in public schools get.
Yet in February, the New York City Department of Education proposed, as an accommodation of the city’s growing Muslim population, the setting up a free-standing public school dedicated to teaching, in Arabic, the religion-driven Muslim culture and history, along with standard subjects. Personnel and textbooks will be drawn from the ranks of Arab scholars, and Muslim religious garb will be the norm. (And does anyone doubt that Al Jazeera will be the news source of choice?)
Plainly, all the old excruciating calculations were thrown overboard in this transparent – and shameless – attempt to kowtow to the expanding Muslim presence here. Indeed, if there were any doubt as to the motivation in play, this past week Schools Chancellor Joel Klein bowed to the objections of parents in the school where the academy was to be located – they insisted there was not enough room – and said he would find another location.
Did Mr. Klein not know from the start that space given to a new enterprise would diminish that which was available to the existing one? One is reminded of the classic mock dismay of the corrupt Captain Louis Renault in “Casablanca” (“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”)
It would be one thing to reasonably accommodate the religious practices of individual Muslims so that they not be required to choose between their faith and full participation in American society. America in general and New York in particular have been great, and largely unique, places for that – as we in the Jewish community well know.
But it is quite another thing to establish a taxpayer-funded school promoting religion. That is something the Jewish community never even contemplated – and we would have be wrong had we done so.
