US funds madrassas in Afghanistan (ain't that peachy)

[donsu]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d1b9e546-ceb4-11dc-877a-000077b07658.html


The US military is funding the construction of Islamic schools, or madrassas, in the east of Afghanistan in an attempt to stem the tide of young people going to radical religious schools in Pakistan.

Such schools spawned the Taliban movement, which harboured Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader behind the September 11 terror attacks on the US, before it was swept from power in 2001.

US reconstruction cash has helped establish two state-run madrassas in the province of Khost, and a third is on its way.

Commander David Adams, head of the US provincial reconstruction team in Khost, the province on the border with Pakistan, said more were planned.

“We would like to see small religious schools in every district so that parents don’t have to send their children over the border ,” he told the Financial Times.
-snip-
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why do we even bother

[MADem]

1. Pretty much ALL schools over in that end of the world are "Islamic schools"

To some extent or another, it's like the public schools in Spain or Italy used to be--they sported a cross on the wall, and no one even noticed.

When your society is homogenous, you're going to have teachers that discuss religious holidays, the Qu'ran, and faith-based issues anyway--it's not like the "regular" schools eschew this stuff.

They're affiliating these things with the mosques, and that makes sense--you send your rugrats to the mosque anyway to learn their Qu'ran, so this is just a more comfortable way of imparting the information (that their parents WANT them to get anyway, and they WILL send them elsewhere if they can't get it at home).

[donsu]

2. our school system is in crisis and we spend money on schools

in Afghan.?

if we had a money surplus we could help a lot of countries but not when we have 'children left behind' and a recession/depression/crash.

[MADem]

4. Energy pipelines. Gotta keep those guys friendly. That's what this is about. NT

[NNN0LHI]

3. Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html

Back to school in Afghanistan
CBC News Online | January 27, 2004

The National | Airdate: May 6, 2002

Reporter: Carol Off | Producer: Heather Abbott | Editor: Catherine McIsaac

When 1.5 million children went back in school in Afghanistan in the spring of 2002, a tough lesson was waiting for them. While the country welcomed some semblance of peace for the first time in years, war remained very much a part of its classrooms. Afghanistan's teachers tried to erase war images from the textbooks, images that got there in the first place due in large part to Cold War policies in the United States.

Textbooks are full of guns, swords and other images of war

At a public school in Kabul, students and teachers are anxious for some kind of normal routine. Some children bring their own chairs to school, if they have them. The school was almost destroyed by war. There's no electricity. It's colder inside than out. The cement floor is freezing.

But the students don't mind. The young women and girls at this school are back in the classroom after five years of banishment by the Taliban.

Women in their 20s have returned to Grade 11. But they're not bitter, they're happy.

Getting children back to school is a number one priority in Afghanistan's post war government. But the big question is: what will they learn?

Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction. This isn't their idea. During decades of war, the classroom has been the best place to indoctrinate young people with their duty to fight. Government-sponsored textbooks in Afghanistan are filled with violence. For years, war was the only lesson that counted.

The Mujahideen, Afghanistan's freedom fighters, used the classroom to prepare children to fight the Soviet empire. The Russians are long gone but the textbooks are not. The Mujahideen had wanted to prepare the next generation of Afghans to fight the enemy, so pupils learned the proper clips for a Kalashnikov rifle, the weight of bombs needed to flatten a house, and how to calculate the speed of bullets. Even the girls learn it.



Look we have done it before:

But the Mujahideen had a lot of help to create this warrior culture in the school system from the United States, which paid for the Mujahideen propaganda in the textbooks. It was all part of American Cold War policy in the 1980s, helping the Mujahideen defeat the Soviet army on Afghan soil.

University of Nebraska

The University of Nebraska was front and center in that effort. The university did the publishing and had an Afghan study center and a director who was ready to help defeat the "Red Menace."

"I think Ronald Reagan himself felt that this was a violation of the rights of the Afghans," says Tom Goutier, who was behind the Mujahideen textbook project. "I think a lot of those working for him thought this was an opportunity for us to do the Soviet Union some damage."

[Malikshah]

5. First of all-- the reporter needs to get the spelling right.

It is madrasa, not madrassa. Why the nitpick? The spelling mistake is endemic of a larger conceptual misunderstanding of how traditional education in the Muslim world operates.

Madrasa refers to a place of learning. There are madrasas and there are madrasas. Not all espouse radical views.

[Igel]

6. But it's also 'madrasah'.

But 'madrasah' obviously doesn't point to a conceptual mistake, but to a historical mistake.

But others spell it 'madrasah', which indicates a thorough-going miscomprehension about the role of writing in Muhammed's time.

Those that spell it 'madrassah' have a problem with comprehending what true Marxist dialectics, from Deobandi perspective, are.

The people that use the plural 'madrasas' have a deep misunderstanding about the role of plurals and of event structure in all natural languages, when anybody with the slightest comprehension of Arabic (or language) would have to write 'madaris'. Or possibly 'madaaris', if you're into expressing phonemic length without using diacritics.

That's the problem with assigning deep meaning to variant transliterations. Sometimes a variant is just a variant. There is a correct, traditional spelling in Arabic; right now I'm not writing in Arabic, so who gives a damn. In English, there are a multitude of spellings, some more common and some less common; largely it depends upon whether one is transliterating or transcribing, and upon whether or not one is using one of the contemporary English-language systems or an older one ("madrassa" and "madrassah" are more traditional and less slavishly follow the Arabic), or is influenced by French or German traditions. For example, most former French colonies still use a French-inspired transliteration. The American linguistic transcription is annoying. One muddles through without the need for an Islamic Academy for the Prevention of Transcription Errors and Promotion of Orthographic Virtue and little obnoxious munchkins running around with their sticks to respect the principle of non-compulsion by beating people.

Same problem with Chajkovskij, as I prefer to spell the composer's name. But many write it Chaikovsky, or even Tchaikovsky (damned French), and then there's Tschaikowsky, with a slightly German flair. What's funny is when some prescriptivist who has decided there's just One True Path that all must follow--and he must make sure people follow it--get a hold of language.

[TahitiNut]

8. That's why I listen to the music of Joe Green.

:shrug:

[Malikshah]

9. Your post missed my point, but that's par for the course.

There is nothing wrong with US aid going to assist in rebuilding Afghanistan's educational system.

[TahitiNut]

7. "Vouchers for the children of Afghanistan!!"

:eyes: