CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS UNDERMINE INTEGRATION

According to Amsterdam resident Burcin Cakir, religious educational institutions, such as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish grammar and high schools, prepare their graduates for little more than an isolationistic existence, and should not be in any way state-supported, or perhaps even tolerated.

You will note that his name shows him to be a non-native of Amsterdam. And you can probably guess his derivation. Yes, his ancestry does indeed lie in a country where till not too long ago Sharia was the basis of law (*).
And you might well suspect him of certain tendencies which cause rabid gibbering in paranoid outposts of the internet.

The target of his ire, however, is not per se the lamentable Christianizing tendencies of parochial schools, catering to fine people of faith, nor the Jewish academies inculcating halachic adherencies, but the Ibn Ghaldoun institution in Rotterdam, that being an Islamic high-school whose students come from a Muslim background.


Here's what Burcin Cakir effendi has to say about religious schools:

"Ik heb nooit begrepen waarom men in een land waarin er een scheiding van kerk en staat zou moeten zijn, scholen op religieuze grondslag toestaat. En dat geldt dubbel voor islamitische scholen, die volgens rapporten van de onderwijsinspectie alleen maar segregatie in de hand werken en zeer lage onderwijsprestaties afleveren."

[Translation: I have never understood why, in a country where church and state are allegedly separated, religious schools are allowed to exist. And that goes double for Islamic schools, which, according to the reports of the education board, only ensure segregation and yield extremely low academic results.]

Source: http://www.telegraaf.nl/watuzegt/21646582/___Integratie_wordt_gedwarsboomd___.html (In Dutch, from the Telegraaf newspaper.

"Ibn Ghaldoun is een typisch voorbeeld van zo’n school. Een liberale moslim zal zijn kind nooit naar een islamitische school sturen. Enerzijds vanwege de slechte kwaliteit van het onderwijs en anderzijds omdat hij de geest van zijn kind niet wil laten corrumperen door conservatieve (lees: extremistische) moslims."

[Translation: Ibn Ghaldoun is a typical example of such a school. A liberal Muslim would never send his child to such an Islamic school; on the one hand because of the lousy quality of education, on the other because he would not wish the mind of his child to be corrupted by conservative (i.e. extremist) Muslims.]

"Ik heb dan ook geen goed woord over voor de ouders van de Ibn Ghaldoun-leerlingen. Zij bereiden hun kinderen niet voor op een goede toekomst, ze veroordelen hen juist tot een bestaan buiten de Nederlandse maatschappij. En de linkse en christelijke partijen die weigeren het onderwijs in Nederland openbaar te maken, zijn medeplichtig. Zij steunen niet alleen scholen als Ibn Ghaldoun, ze zorgen er bijvoorbeeld ook voor dat op dergelijke scholen Arabisch als eindexamenvak gegeven mag worden. Een vak dat voor de Nederlandse samenleving en economie geen enkele waarde heeft. Ondertussen keldert het onderwijsniveau al decennialang."

[Translation: Consequently, I have nothing good to say about the parents of the Ibn Ghaldoun students. They are not preparing their children for a good future, but rather condemn them to an existence outside of Netherlandish society. And the leftwing and Christian parties that refuse to make education in the Netherlands purely public are complicit. They not only support schools like Ibn Ghaldoun, they also provide that Arabic is final-exam material in such schools; a subject which has absolutely no value whatsoever to Dutch society or the Dutch economy. And in the meantime, educational standards have been plummeting for decades.]


And there you have it. Here a Dutchman of Muslim derivation slams ALL religious schools. And rightly so. In a country where Church and State are separate, religious propagandizing in lieu of public education should not be tolerated. If nutball parents want their kids to get any faith-based instruction, it should be entirely secondary to the public curriculum and in no way at all sabotage their children's intellectual development or understanding of the knowledge tax-funded institutions impart.



AFTERTHOUGHT

Here in California. it is public education that suffers, as the great American mob has made it clear that in the main they will not support any education at all, and prefer everyone who depends upon the public school system to end up as illiterate and ignorant as they can possibly be. Parents who wish their children to have a future fight to get them into those very few institutions that will inculcate a modicum of learning.
Hence upstanding Muslims sending their sons and daughters to Catholic schools, Wasps moving to gated communities, and the general desperation of San Francisco families to get their offspring into Lowell High.

In general, Americans are no dumber than anyone else.
Until they graduate.
Usually.


NOTES

Amsterdam is a liberal metropolis in northern Europe, you may have heard of the place. They speak Dutch there. Burcin Cakir is a Turkish name, it does not fit Dutch naming conventions or orthography; Turks are not originally from Northern Europe.
Many Amsterdammers with whom you should be familiar (e.g., a well-known playwright, a portraitist, a disputatious philosopher, et autres) similarly came from elsewhere.

Sharia is the Islamic law-code. Among other things it is remarkable for extremely rigorous standards of evidence and testimony, especially as regards offenses which require a punishment that cannot be undone; standards which the Salafists & Wahabis have discarded almost entirely.
Until the Hatt-ı Şerif-ı Gülhane (Tanzimât Fermânı, 1839), Sharia was the basis for Ottoman law. Successive promulgations increasingly supplanted religious law with civil code, at last replacing the entire structure with a system that guaranteed rights to all irrespective of creed or caste. This process was continued under Atatürk, and it should be noted that while many European countries still in some way enshrine religion as a basis for the state, by 1922 Turkey was a secular republic.

Turks in Northern Europe immigrated during the seventies and eighties because many middle-class Europeans refused to do necessary jobs; since then they have raised families, sent their children to school, and opened businesses. For some strange reason, in Holland a lot of them vote for the Christian Democratic Appeal and other not-left-wing parties.
They also write books.

Ibn Ghaldoun was a great philosopher and the father of modern historiography, in addition to being a Renaissance man of extraordinary talents. The Islamic school named after him in Rotterdam has recently been embroiled in a scandal involving stolen answers to final exams.
Ibn Ghaldoun, naturally, is a scholar whose labours will receive no attention in many Christian circles, as he contradicts their fondly held superstitions. Here is what he says about evolution: "The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and to reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of the monkeys, in which both sagacity and perception are found, but which has not reached the stage of actual reflection and thinking. At this point we come to the first stage of man after the world of monkeys. This is as far as our physical observation extends." This is a suspiciously keen statement; clearly not suitable for fundamentalists.
As-sayid Abu-Zayd Abdur-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun al Hadramawti effendi would be most displeased that the students of the school named after him so dishonoured his memory.
As who wouldn't.


*    *    *    *    *    *    *


I should probably mention that when I lived in the Netherlands, the schools which I attended were indeed public and laudably secular. That was not the case with many of my contemporaries, most of whom went to rigid Catholic institutions where they were taught that we and everyone else at the public school were heathens, damned for all eternity, and to be avoided at all costs. Many of them have since then realized that other people are also human, but some of them remained the nasty narrow-minded little shits they were when finally spewed out by the monks.
Additionally, a number of children were sent to Protestant schools, so that their precious little souls would never get corrupted by ideas not vetted by clench-arsed Calvinist theologians.


For further critical thoughts about the Netherlands, click this link: Rottekaas.
You may not like what you find, however.
For more favourable reviews of both the country and the people, you might want to read the entries here: Valkenswaard.
These posts will show their more pleasant side as well as my own.



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