New program in Israel promotes teaching Arabic in Jewish schools
Aspiring to connect between Israeli and Arab residents, the municipality of Jerusalem promotes a new program that will teach school pupils not literary Arabic, but the spoken one.
The Jerusalem municipality prepares to launch next week, as the school year begins, a new curriculum called "Ahalan" to teach schoolchildren in Jewish schools in the city spoken Arabic.
The curriculum, put together by the municipality's education administration, came into being in order to shed a positive light, create a connection to the Arabic language and thus connect East to West Jerusalem by giving children the tools to communicate. The curriculum's emphasis is on spoken rather than written Arabic, in contrast to many Arabic-language curricula for Jewish schools.
The idea is that teaching spoken Arabic would create a way to communicate between the city's Jewish and Arab residents. This is a city that is on paper united but in actuality has never been; there is a disconnect between the east of the city and the west, and tension between Jewish and Arab residents is always present and can blow up at any given moment. An example can be seen in the attack of two Arab light rail conductors by Jewish teens last month or the attack on Jews by Palestinians at the tomb of Samuel north of the city.
In recent years, the Arabic language has hardly been studied in Jewish schools. The Ministry of Education admitted at the beginning of the year that about a third of Jewish middle schools do not fulfill the requirement to teach Arabic, and that in the past five years there has been a decline of about a third in the number of Jewish students who take the matriculation exam in the Arabic language.
