The travails of teaching Arabs their own language

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To promote reading, Saudi Arabia is distributing Japanese-style comics to every Saudi child over ten, with superheroes speaking Arabic slang

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The root of the problem is bad teaching. Arabic lessons are dull and focus on fiddly grammar. Classrooms often have no printed material. Few schools have libraries. Teachers tend to lack “sufficient mastery of the language itself”, says the report. In universities across the region, Arabic departments, along with religious studies ones, attract students with the lowest grades.

In Morocco almost 60% of teachers of ten-year-olds have no higher education. Only Bahrain has a teacher-training college that specialises in teaching Arabic. Teachers tend to be traditionalists, sometimes resorting to beating.

Adults often stumble over the written word, too, so bedtime reading to children is rare. Only about a quarter of Arabic-speaking parents read to their children often, compared with more than 70% in much of the West. Reading for pleasure is widely regarded as critical for a child’s future success. But studies show that Arabic-speaking children do much less of that than children in the West.

Arab education ministries are waking up to the problem. Egypt has developed a trove of online material to bypass the traditionalists. Thehas begun fitting classrooms with “reading corners”. Across the Arab world girls far outperform boys, in part because female teachers tend to be better, so Saudi Arabia has defied crusty clerics and let women teach boys (though separately from girls).

Traditionalists quake at such irreverent handling of the sacred language. And Arab regimes are nervous of the free expression a more liberal approach may inspire. Their censors are banning books as keenly as ever and ensure that newspapers all say the same thing. Many officials prefer to keep children disciplined by making them memorise what they’re told, says Andrew Hammond, a lecturer in Arabic culture at Oxford University. Otherwise, he says, they might start thinking for themselves.

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Here we go again 🙄

That's pretty cool

Every child or every boy?

This is very important review of children education. This is a fallacy with consequences of beyond decades. Entertainment_education approach to inconclate primary education with cues from their own culture and history is better.

Great idea

Saudi’s and the Emirates may be the last vestige of societal progress on earth

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