Do they know anything about Islam? Rights and wrongs of multicultural ed

I was in Cambridge, Mass., in February of last year when I heard the latest news out of Iraq: The al-Askari Mosque, the so-called "Golden Mosque" of Samarra, had been nearly leveled in a devastating explosion.

It was a Wednesday, and that night I attended my weekly seminar on Cambridge authors, led by James Russell, a prodigious member of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. He arrived late to class, and was not in the mood to talk about T. S. Eliot when he did. "Do any of you know what the Golden Mosque is?" he asked. Blank stares followed. Smart though they reputedly are, few Harvard undergraduates had heard of the mosque, or knew that it is one of Shiite Islam's most holy sites.

Professor Russell sighed, and his voice took on a mournful tone. "This war is something completely different than it was yesterday. The violence this is going to unleash will make the last few months look positively tranquil." His warnings were prescient, but should not have seemed so gilded by expertise: Only the most cursory bits of knowledge about Islam and its sects were necessary to deduce the gravity of the crime and the reprisals it would inspire. But how many students had even this basic knowledge?

The answer is a sad one, especially for a university such as Harvard, which routinely trumpets its "international" character and insists its students are "generally educated": instructed not to be pre-packaged professionals, but to obtain a broad education that, supposedly, helps one understand our "global society." Yet until the New York Times and The Economist told them otherwise, the attack on the Golden Mosque seemed a pedestrian event to my friends: one bombing in a troubled place where bombings are mundane. In the weeks after, I gently quizzed my friends and acquaintances. Did they know:

* The major theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites?
* The countries in the region with Sunni majorities?
* Those with Shiite majorities?
* Some of the main pilgrimage sites in the Muslim world?
* Whether al-Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite?

This is a basic quiz, and its answers are highly pertinent to our modern world. But the results, while informal, spoke to an ignorance so grand as to render meaningless concerns over the margin of error. (And it is not just Harvard students who disappoint. The al-Qaeda question was posed last year to Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who now heads the House Intelligence Committee; he answered incorrectly.)

It is an oft-repeated criticism that schools have stopped teaching facts per se, touting instead grand theories that organize facts in a manner convenient to theorists' work. Nowhere is this truer than in "postcolonial" studies of the Middle East (as well as Africa and Latin America). In a college course on Islam, a student is more likely to be assigned Edward Said's historiography, as the theory and method of writing history is known, than an actual history textbook. Rarely will a student be held accountable for definitional knowledge--you don't need to know why Shiite Iranians call their religious leaders "ayatollahs," or even when Muhammad lived, but you had better understand how the emergence of Islam reshaped the gender structure of Arab society. There is a good case to be made for knowing all of that, but without the bare facts of people, places, and the dates they intersected, a critical analysis of same is useless. Learning this way is like wearing jeans with a button and a zipper, but no denim: quite impossible.

At times, the grandiose theorizing of academics is harmless, even amusing. But vis-a-vis Islam, students' ignorance is tragic, because, like it or not, we really do live in that much-prophesied global, interconnected world: What happens to a mosque, especially one in Iraq, may well have an impact on us and our cause. For as long a time as that is true, understanding cultures outside our own will be one of the foremost intellectual necessities.

This sounds flaky in the extreme to a good many conservatives. Indeed, their suspicion is well-placed--a true understanding of another culture is very different from the "understanding" fostered in higher education.

These days, to "understand" is rarely about obtaining specific knowledge about a foreign culture through patient study; usually, to "understand" is to excuse, or to change the subject. An example: One week at Harvard, not so long ago, there were no fewer than five panels bemoaning American "militarization," "imperialism," and supposed human-rights abuses. This, as it happened, was the same week when riots exploded across the globe in response to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of several cartoons depicting Muhammad. But a student would have tried in vain to find a panel addressing the question that obviously needed to be asked: Why was the Muslim world burning over a few cartoons, printed in an obscure source?

Apart from extracurricular panels, there is the question of coursework. Or, rather, there's not the question, at least for most students. Add Islam and Muslim society to the long list of subjects, from Shakespeare to American history, that Ivy Leaguers from Yale to Princeton to Harvard can avoid ever encountering in their academic careers. Although schools have moved to embrace "internationalism," this pedagogical vogue exists in portions so small as to be useless. In Harvard's latest curricular review, for instance, it is claimed to be a "serious commitment" to our "global society" that the university requires its students to take one year of a foreign language. Not enough to have a conversation or read a newspaper, but perhaps graduates will be able to order falafel at their nearest Lebanese restaurant.

Harvard undergraduates are also required to take one class chosen from a small but schizoid list of "Foreign Cultures" offerings. Incredibly, in the 2007-08 academic year, none of the "Foreign Cultures" courses concerns Islam or the Middle East. If a student does want to learn something about Islam and have it count for credit, he'll have to wait until next year. And then, he'll be faced with a choice between two. Will he take "Gendered Communities: Women, Islam, and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa," taught by the chairman of the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality? Or will he select "Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies"?

He would do well to choose neither. As comprehensive as "Understanding Islam" sounds, it hardly lives up to its grand name, digressing in pursuit of the professor's own passion. That would be Sufi mysticism in India and Africa, a topic that is as obscure as it is exculpatory of Islam's lately radical tendency. (Sufis are to Islam what Quakers are to Christianity.) In any case, Sufism has little to do with why, in the decade in which we live, a student would sign himself up for a course called "Understanding Islam."

Despite the pretense of "understanding" other cultures, or "respecting" or "being sensitive to" them, few universities have moved beyond the platitudinous. A real sensitivity for other cultures entails discerning their differences, perhaps even more than finding their common ground. What is not respectful of Islam would be to assume that those of its adherents who brook no separation of civil and religious authority would be motivated by the same, largely secular incentives that motivate us in the West. A person who truly understands Shiite Islam will be able to comprehend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's millennial behavior and appreciate that he is perfectly serious in his belief that the twelfth Imam, whom God is said to have hidden from human view in the 9th century, will be reappearing soon to redeem the world for Islam.

For reasons that are even more obvious today than they were a century ago, learning the fundamentals of world religions still should be a pillar of a liberal education. A just-the-facts approach may seem pedantic and arcane to students who are themselves mostly agnostic. But in our time, it is not too much to ask that anyone who graduates from a prestigious American university have at least a functional knowledge of Islam and the Muslim world. This is the least effortful and most practical civic duty we can ask universities to bear. And if such a simple calling cannot be fulfilled, then American higher education will have further endangered its reputation as a useful institution.

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Britain's failing government schools

More than half a million children are being taught in failing secondary schools that risk closure by the Government. New GCSE league tables published today indicate that 639 of Britain's 3,000 state secondaries have failed to meet the Government's minimum target for 30 per cent of pupils achieving five GCSEs at grades A* to C, including English and maths. Last year, the Prime Minister vowed to shut down or take over schools that did not reach that level within five years.

Overall, the tables show that the rate of progress in improving GCSE results has almost ground to a halt. Fewer than half of pupils (just 46 per cent) last year achieved five GCSEs at grades A* to C, up just 0.7 percentage points on the previous year. Selective grammar schools continued to dominate the league tables, with the state Colchester Royal Grammar School in Essex, at the top.

Yesterday Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said that there would be no let-up in the pressure on low-performing schools, adding that 170 of the 639 were just a few percentage points from meeting the target. "We owe it to parents to make sure low-performing schools turn around quickly. I share parents' impatience for improvement not just in low-achieving schools, but in all schools," he said. He added that the Government would investigate whether to close the worst-performing schools or to "federate" them with neighbouring higher performing schools. Alternatively it could turn them into academies [charter schools] that are independently sponsored and run. But, while results for academies [charter schools] are generally improving, today's results show that 17 of the 40 academies reporting GCSE results were found in the league table of the worst 200 state schools in England.

Michael Gove, the Shadow Children's Secretary, said that the number of pupils at the bottom end of Britain's long tail of underachievement was growing. The number of children not even passing five GCSEs with grade G, including English and maths, is now at 90,000, up 5,000 on last year. Almost 130,000 children are not getting even a single grade C at GCSE. "Until we slash pointless bureaucracy, give teachers real powers to enforce discipline, and focus on the basics, we will fail another generation of our most disadvantaged children," Mr Gove said. [He's got that right! But don't wait for it to happen]

The tables also indicate that the number of immigrant children in GCSE classes who were unable to speak English has risen by 50 per cent over two years to 2,000. While this is a small proportion of the 600,000 or so pupils eligible for GCSE examination in England, teachers' leaders gave warning that the influx was creating "huge turbulence" and disrupting classes. This would suggest a total of 20,000 non-English-speakers if extrapolated to the whole school system.

In science, the league tables show that only half of teenagers in England are reaching the required standard. A new measure, showing the percentage of pupils achieving at least two passes in science at GCSE, was introduced for the first time this year. The results reveal that, nationally, only half of students (50.3 per cent) achieved two grade passes (A* to C) in science. These findings underscore concerns raised recently by employers and universities about the long-term fall-off in numbers studying science at A level and then undergraduate level. Hilary Leevers, assistant director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, described the results as disappointing, but said that the new measure would help to track progress.

However, independent schools have fiercely criticised it, because it effectively places subjects such as physics, biology and chemistry on a par with options described by some as "pub subjects", such as environmental and land-based science.

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Australia: Leftist education academics reject evidence about phonics

They are too infantile to be able to admit that they were wrong

LEADING Australian education experts continue to reject scientific evidence that teaching phonics improves reading skills in children. The latest results from a seven-year Scottish study show that children taught how to put sounds together to read words, called synthetic phonics, had significantly better reading skills than their peers taught using analytic phonics, breaking whole words into their constituent sounds.

But eminent Australian literacy researcher Allan Luke, from the Queensland University of Technology, questions the validity of using evidence-based research in assessing teaching methods. Professor Luke, a former director-general of the Queensland Education Department and ministerial adviser on education, has dismissed scientific studies showing the benefit of phonics.

Speaking at a curriculum symposium last month, he said the studies provided no evidence that alternate methods had failed. Opponents of a phonics approach in teaching reading argue that it fails to enhance students' reading comprehension. The seven-year Scottish study found that, under the synthetic phonics approach, students' reading was 42 months ahead of the average for their age and spelling was 20 months ahead. But their comprehension was a more modest 3.5 months ahead, which researcher Rhona Johnston said was due to a substantial number of students coming from socially disadvantaged areas.

To counter the criticism, Professor Johnston, now at the University of Hull in England, and her colleague Joyce Watson, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, compared a group of 10-year-olds from Clackmannanshire with a similarly disadvantaged group of students in England. The Scottish children read words 24 months ahead of what is expected for their age while the word reading of the English students was on target. In spelling, the Scottish children were six months ahead of their age compared to the English students. In comprehension, the Scottish children were on target for their age, while the English students were 6.6 months behind.

Literacy expert Kevin Wheldall, from Macquarie University, said phonics taught children how to decode written language and was a necessary first step in learning to read. "Comprehension comes from a good understanding of spoken English, but if you can't decode words, then it doesn't matter how good your listening comprehension is," he said. "(Critics) seem to be determined not to believe the evidence."

Professor Luke made his comments at a curriculum symposium last month hosted by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association in conjunction with the Queensland teachers union, state education department and the Queensland Studies Authority, which sets school curriculum. Professor Luke's paper argues that the troubled No Child Left Behind program in the US to improve reading skills, which prescribes a phonics approach and standardised testing, shows such an approach would fail in Australia. It says consistent in both countries "has been the rise of a 'gold standard' of evidence-based research as the major criterion for deciding what will be considered 'valid' as evidence of success in literacy teaching".

"It begins from what we term the phonics hypothesis: that there is scientific evidence that literacy achievement can be improved through systematic curricular approaches to pedagogy that emphasise 'alphabetics' or phonics," the paper says. "There is little recognition of the host of contributing factors identified in ethnographic, case-based and quantitative literacy research. Factors like home-school transitions and access; the variable impacts of community cultural and linguistic background; the effects of poverty; the increasing incidence of special needs; and the impacts of differential school resourcing."

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