Segragated Islamic Schooling comes to Madrid

Cut, slash, gash, incise, chop and even sever…strong words deeply atoned every day around the world. The twenty-four hour media then echoes this curious form of liturgical chant offered by the new high priests in suits and ties so that it reaches every hidden corner on earth. Their message is clear; that there is a newly-decreed desperate need to hack away at profitless ventures like universal health and education in order to appease the newest and latest deity to demand tribute from us humble mortals: God-Market.

For God-Market is voracious, all powerful and demands growth and profit at all expense, and your poor neighbor’s cancer treatment and little junior learning to read are not listed as exceptions in GM’s commandments.

But clear away the fog of incense, hymns and 24-hour misinformation and it becomes clear that the mantra of reduction may not always be what it seems. In fact, one person’s reduction may be someone else’s gain.

Gods very rarely get along and play well together, especially those which insist on being the ‘real’ and only one, but it seems that here is where we can find an exception. God-Market and other deities can get together if they share a common foe: hapless, profitless, public education.

Back in 2009 when the current economic crisis was well underway, the government of Madrid ceded 24,000 square metres of public land to an Islamic educational foundation based in Mecca, Saudi Arabia to found a school that would segregate girls and boys in Alcala de Henares.

This is the second piece of land, albeit slightly smaller than the first, that the regional government has given over to the foundation. The new agreement will give the Islamic foundation the exclusive right to use the land for the next 75 years. There were various bids for the land but in the end the Islamic foundation outbid similar projects from similar foundations from Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.

The school, which will eventually give classes to children from zero to eighteen, will only start off with classes for children in primary school. On their web page, the Islamic foundation states that their reasoning for separating boys from girls is to attend to the diversity that inherently exists between boys and girls while respecting their dignity and their rights, allowing of course for the obvious differences that exist between the two.

The decision was greeted with surprise and disbelief from the opposition and from the local public school board which had also recently been granted the use of public land, although 10,000 metres smaller than the one granted to the Islamic foundation and clearly not big enough to meet their demand.

The foundation’s director however defended against the criticism by saying that the parents of the children who attended his school were also tax payers and had the right to educate their children in creationist ideals along strict lines of Islamic belief. He also emphasised that the parents of children who attended his school would take advantage of the fact that 90% of students with special needs are enrolled in public schools and that the great majority of immigrants also chose the public sector, thus making his school a much more attractive investment for the regional government.

Curiously enough, all of this comes at a time when the Spanish courts are trying to establish the exact legality of publicly funded schools that segregated girls from boys. The Spanish education law (LOE) clearly states that mixed schools will be given preference yet Madrid lies just behind Catalonia (15) and Andalusia (11) in the number of said schools.

The above is a startling piece of news and one that is of course (mostly) false. Many readers were surely ‘indignant’ at the thought of an Islamic foundation teaching their particular version of the world in schools paid for with public money. Yet take out the italicized word Islamic and replace it with another and for some reason the piece suddenly becomes less offensive to some. A reason that brings into the open that the war waged against public education is not something that arose solely due to the crisis, but a frightening amalgamation of deities set on eroding what should be free and available to all, a truly public education.

 

Comments

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