London – Beginning in September 2014, the UK will require primary schools to offer and teach at least one of seven approved languages to students between the ages of seven and 11, with the exclusion of the Hebrew language. The Board of Deputies has said such a move could have a negative impact on Jewish education in the UK.
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The Jewish Chronicle reports (http://bit.ly/UFZ1kg) that this compulsory proposal will prove difficult to comply with for many Jewish primary schools which already provide instruction in Jewish studies and the national curriculum, and presently only teach Hebrew as a foreign language. The Board says Jewish schools will be unable to offer both Hebrew and another foreign language in the daily schedule.
But some Jewish primary schools like the Michael Sobell Sinai School in Kenton already manage to teach a second foreign language besides Hebrew, including offering instruction in French and some Spanish.
Laura Marks, senior vice-president of the Board of Deputies, said the government’s plan would likely be “extremely detrimental to our community’s identity, as language — including modern and classical Hebrew — is a vital ingredient to understanding our faith and culture.” She said the government should “reject the idea of stipulating just a narrow range of languages.”
Additional proof of british pandering to their vast moslem constituents who’ll eventually outnumber their anglo saxon compatriots!
And why aren’t we surprised
Just plain dumb. It definitely is important to learn a foreign language, but who is to say which one is more important than another? If the majority of children in a school are of Bangladeshi origin, what is wrong with teaching Bengali? BTW, the languages they selected were French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Latin and ancient Greek. It is obviously so much more important for a child to learn ancient Greek, spoken today by no one, than to learn Russian, or Hindi, or Hebrew, all with millions of living speakers.
Does this apply to privately-funded schools too? If not, that is another reason not to take money from the British government, and another reason to be opposed to vouchers here in the US.
Good, they should teach them Arabic because most of the UK are Muslims. Like this they could hear what the Muslim terrorist are planing for their next attack.
The UK is not as British as it once was. One time, when a Jewish visitor from the UK was visiting my community, he told me that he was surprised to see the various Chanukah greetings on tv, by various stations. He stated that in the UK, he never saw that occur.
It would seem to be a matter of the British public and government and not worth anyone else’s time.
Just about every yeshiva high school in the NY/NJ area offers a foreign language such as French, Spanish, besides hebrew in their curriculums.
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Why, are they offering Arabic?
Some of the schools in NJ started to teach Chinese a few years ago. Thjey called it the language of the future then.