480
Itongadol.- Surveys of fifth-grade attitudes to Arabs in 2010 and 2012 revealed growing anti-Arab extremism in the student body. The exception to that trend were students who participated in the Ya Salam program, in which students are taught spoken Arabic at school.
Increasing extremism among school-age children is due to the “continued deterioration in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel in recent years, which causes hate, fear and separatism,” according to a report by the Henrietta Szold Institute in Jerusalem. On the other hand, the Arabic studies program “succeeded to a great extent in preventing the negative influence of anti-Arab opinion on the participants in the program.”
The Abraham Fund Initiatives, which is behind Ya Salam, is campaigning to have it taught throughout the country. But the Education Ministry has yet to make a decision on the matter, despite previous promises to do so.
Education Ministry rules make Arabic a mandatory subject in junior high school, with three hours of class a week. But, as with much else in the education system, there is a large gap between directives and their implementation. Latest figures show that only some 100,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students in Jewish schools study Arabic – about half of the number that should be learning the language, according to Ministry directives.
Schools are also required to teach Arabic in tenth-grade, but only 10 percent of students actually study it. Two years ago, only 3,671 Jewish students took the Arabic matriculation exam.
The Ya Salam curriculum for fifth- and sixth-grades is intended to be the beginning of continued Arabic studies in junior high school (which in Israel starts in seventh grade.) The curriculum, which was developed by the Abraham Fund in cooperation with the ministry, was rolled out in 15 schools in Carmiel and Haifa in 2005.
Today, it is taught in some 200 schools across the country with 23,000 students. The program is mandatory in Haifa and the ministry’s entire northern region and is also taught in a few dozen schools in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the south. About 100 teachers teach the program, the great majority of whom are Arabs. For most of the students, it is their first meeting with an Arab under equal conditions.
The Szold Institute report, which is being reported here for the first time, showed that two-thirds of the school principals involved said the Arabic teachers have integrated well into their schools, and all of the teachers said the students and teachers had received them positively.
The report praises Ya Salam highly. It found that 91 percent of the principals are satisfied or very satisfied with the program as taught in their schools and recommend that it, or a similar program, be included in the mandatory curriculum for all schools.
Written and oral tests show the program is reaching its educational goals; by the end of seventh-grade, Ya Salam students have better grades in Arabic than those doing standard Arabic classes, even though the practice has traditionally been to introduce spoken language subsequent to classical, written Arabic. The traditional view was that introducing the spoken language first “not only did not contribute but it was confusing and damaging,” said Dedi Komem, the director of the educational program at the Abraham Fund, who has been involved in the project for seven years.
The Szold Institute report dedicates a separate section to how the program affected the opinions of students about Arabic language and culture. For example, among students who did not participate in the program, there was a drop in interest in Arabic language and culture, as well as in the numbers of those showing a positive attitude towards Arabs – including the willingness to have relationships with Arabs. But among those who participated in the program, not only were the opinions more positive, they also had less of a stereotypical view of Arabs.
“We tried to think of what is needed so Jews and Arabs can live together, and we thought that the lack of knowledge of the language is the first barrier to contact between people,” said Orna Simhon, head of the Education Ministry’s northern region. “At the same time, we are also strengthening the study of Hebrew in the Arab schools,” she said. Expanding the program to all of Israel would be the right thing to do, said Simhon.
But Komem says the ministry is not budgeting adequate resources to implement it – and certainly not enough to expand it.
The Education Ministry did not respond to a question on the cuts in resources for the Ya Salam program. nor did it comment on the expansion of the program the entire country. The Ministry said it had only received the report a short time ago and it would be discussed by the Ministry’s Pedagogical Secretariat.