An Alternate Witness

Is today's education teaching our children to live in their world?

Leaving my job as a second grade teacher at the Modern American School here in Amman, Jordan, has made me rethink a conversation we frequently had in Peace Corps with Jackie and Lynn, who were retired elementary school teachers, and had been students in the American system fifty years ago. They would frequently say that Jordan's education system is about where America's was 50 years ago, and it would take time to catch up. I would say that the Modern American School may be where the American system was 40 years ago, but I keep thinking back to a video I saw on YouTube some time ago:



We can't afford to be stuck in an educational philosophy that is 40 years old. We can't even afford to be stuck in today's educational philosophy.

I don't know what the answer is. That's the whole point. None of us knows what the answer is, what our new teaching model needs to look like. But I know that it shouldn't look like this:

My math class was the hardest to teach, not only because I don't do math the way most people do math, but also because it was a class of extremes. I had one student who needed me to do every problem with her, because she couldn't remember how to do them from one question to the next. I also had about five students who finished their workbook pages in five minutes, finished four or five additional double-sided worksheets, and still had twenty minutes left in the class period, day after day. My mother suggested what seemed to me like a brilliant solution, which I proposed to my supervisor: Elementary school math books are designed to be more or less self-explanatory to students who are competent readers. Couldn't I just put my best students together at one table and allow them to teach themselves at their own pace? It was essentially what those students had been asking to be allowed to do for weeks.

Now, I know that my supervisor was thinking of the third grade teachers when she answered my question. The third grade teachers who would have those students next year, and have to fit them back into the officially sanctioned little boxes. I am sympathetic to my supervisor's answer, but I am shocked nonetheless by it. She said:

"Absolutely not! We can't have students thinking that they can learn by themselves!"

The parents of my students are being told and believe that they are getting the best possible education for their children. What their children are learning, however, is to work within a social system that will be completely irrelevant by the time they finish college. I'm not sure how to teach for that. I think it probably looks something more like the way I taught for nerd camp. What I know is that it's not the way I was being asked to teach the second grade.

I don't know much about the campaign that is being waged against Rashid Khalidi. I don't remember much of what I read by Rashid Khalidi in graduate school. Unfortunately, I worked so many hours to pay my bills that I had to choose between learning Arabic or reading carefully for my so-called "content classes," and chose the former (but that's another rant for another day). What I do know is that my friend Chris brought this video to my attention while I'm unemployed and have the time to watch it, and I think every student and politician should be listening to what Rashid Khalidi (and presumably the other presenters at this conference) have to say about the state of the Fifth Column.

We had this discussion all the time at Indiana University. With some valuable exceptions, academics have become so turned inward that they don't know how to engage with the public, how to make use of the new media revolution to get out their valuable, informed opinions. Academia and a free press are supposed to be working together to illuminate what government forgets or attempts to cover up. Western liberal democracies tout academic freedom and press freedom as hallmarks of what makes Western liberal democracy great and worth exporting to the developing world. If we can't guarantee those freedoms at home, what business do we have imposing our particular variety of liberal democracy on Iraq, Afghanistan, DR Congo, North Korea, Iran, or anywhere else? If we can't keep the press honest, if we can't keep the debate clean, if we resort to Swiftboat-style personal vendettas, and if we can't give academics the freedom and objectivity that they deserve, how can we claim to be a bastion of liberal democracy?

Because I can tell you with absolute certainty that the rest of the world is watching. I can say this with such certainty because I'm now out in the rest of the world. I'm interacting not only with Jordanians, but with Germans, Filipinas, Mexicans, Canadians ... people from all over the world. I can tell you that they know more about American politics than the majority of Americans know about the politics of any other country in the world, even more than most Americans know about their own politics. Furthermore, I tell you that this is no new phenomenon. I've been out in this world for a decade listening to Europeans, Arabs, Aussies, Kiwis, South and East Asians, Africans and South Americans give detailed, accurate arguments about American foreign AND domestic policy.

They're listening, they're watching, and they are most certainly judging us. If you ask me, they're doing a very good job of it. People here know that while the administration and the media are touting full-voice their support of the occupation of Iraq, the majority of Americans are against it. People out in the world see that American policy is addressing the exact same nuclear issues by making nice with North Korea, but not with Iran or Syria. People here know that the European Union's economic stimulus package announced yesterday is a serious attempt to fix the problem, and the stimulus package McCain made such a big deal of abandoning his campaigning for was just that much flag waving, and won't actually help anyone who really needs it. (They also know that's why Obama won the election.)

People out here are very insightful critics of American policy, politics, media and society, and let me tell you, it does not look good from out here in the rest of the world!

I've been having an interesting series of conversations about language with my top-level adult English students. We've been doing a chapter on language registers: business vs. casual English, written vs. spoken language, the English of different age and cultural groups. There was a question in the book asking whether students believed most people spoke their own language correctly.

Now, you have to understand that asking this question in the Arab world is like asking it in Switzerland or Bavaria. The difference between the dialects of those regions and High German are so great that northern German swear they can't understand a word. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is like High German, the language of writing, TV news and official speeches, except that there is no population which speaks Standard Arabic as their native language. All Arabs first learn a dialect of some sort. Many say that the Levantine dialect of Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon is the closest to Modern Standard, but it is still significantly different.

So I asked my students what they considered to be their native language. Was it dialect, or MSA? About half the class said of course dialect was their native language! They never spoke a word of MSA till some time in elementary school. MSA, which they simply call "Arabic," was a foreign language to them. The rest of the class said that Levantine was not a language, that it was just a corruption of real Arabic. (As a hobby linguist who believes languages are organic, evolving systems, this answer always irks me, but I held my tongue.)

So then we asked the book's question, Do most people speak their native language correctly? Their answers fell predictably along the same lines. Those who considered Levantine their first language said yes, of course we speak our first language correctly. Those who considered MSA their only language claimed that it took years of study to speak even one's native language properly.

The whole conversation reminded me of a conversation I had with my adult class last session. I showed them my resume, which says I speak Standard, Levantine and some Iraqi Arabic. My students considered it completely illogical that Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian dialects should be considered worth mentioning separately. For an Arab, they're all Arabic. They grow up watching Egyptian films, news from al-Jazeera in the Persian Gulf, and call-in shows with dialects from Morocco to Oman. But for me, the differences are huge. Egyptian is unintelligible to me. I was listening to Yemenis on al-Jazeera talk about the recent flood in Hadramawt, and barely understood one word in three. Just listening to the newscasters on al-Jazeera with their fully-inflected MSA is a frustration to me. But put on the Syrian mini-series Baab al-Haara or any other miniseries in Levantine dialect, and I feel very much at home.

This is, of course, opposite to most non-native speakers of Arabic. Unless you learned your Arabic by marrying an Arab, chances are that you learned MSA first and best, and the dialects are just so much grammarless jibberish to you. This is why, when I gave directions home from Club Nai for my American and German friends the other night, the cab driver said, "Are you Jordanian? No? But your Arabic...!"

My standard reponse has become, "I learned my Arabic by living near Gafgafa for two years." Everyone laughs, because everyone knows Gafgafa as the site of one of Jordan's most infamous prisons.

First, let me say that my faith in American democracy has been restored. Regardless of who won this election, I was hoping that we wouldn't have the same quagmire we had in the last two elections, with no one quite sure who really deserved to win, even four and eight years later. I'm glad that McCain and the xenophobic, bellicose GOP right and especially Sarah Palin didn't win, but I'm mostly glad that the election was an unambiguous one.

Those Jordanians who had a preference in the recent election are also mostly pleased by the result. I can't tell you how many people, upon seeing me for the first time after the election, have said "Mabrouk! [Congratulations!]" So tonight in my adult English class at AMIDEAST, I decided to ask my students for their thoughts on the election. Most Jordanians I've spoken to tend to agree that as far as the Middle East is concerned, the two candidates are basically the same. On Palestine, the same. On Afghanistan, the same. On Iran, Obama is calling for more dialogue, but is not significantly less belligerent.

Wait a minute, I said. All of that I can agree with. But what about Iraq? Don't you see a difference there?

No, said Ghassan. Whether it's a few hundred troops, or thousands, both candidates want to leave a troop presence in Iraq. They came for the oil, he said, and that hasn't changed.

However, everyone here seems to recognize that, while there isn't a difference where Arabs are concerned, for Americans there is a huge difference between McCain and Obama on domestic issues. All the Jordanians I've spoken to here know that Obama is calling for national health care, and they will all tell you that he has the better plan to help ordinary Americans in their current financial crisis. On domestic issues, all the Jordanians I've met would say that Obama is clearly the best choice.

And, of course, all the Muslims I know here are delighted that America has elected the son of a Muslim. I haven't actually asked anyone why yet. I can think of two likely reasons, though. First, under Islamic law and tradition, any son or daughter of a Muslim is and always will be a Muslim, so although he's been a practicing Christian for years, many Muslims may be telling themselves that America has a Muslim president. The other, probably more likely reason that comes to mind is that, whether Obama is Muslim or Christian, Muslims in America have come under an awful lot of not-so-flattering scrutiny in America in the last seven years, and at the very least, Obama knows something about Muslims. I think that Muslims may well be hoping, as I am hoping, that an Obama administration will be sympathetic to the troubles of both Muslims and Muslim Americans, or at the very least, will be more rational.