Posted on 12/18/2015 4:05:23 PM PST by mandaladon
A teacher at Riverheads High in Staunton, Va., had students practice calligraphy by copying the Muslim statement of faith. The assignment caused so much controversy that school officials decided to shut down all public schools in Augusta County on Friday. (Reuters)
A Virginia county closed all of its schools Friday because of intense backlash over a class assignment about Islam, with some parents alleging that their children were being subjected to Muslim indoctrination and educators emphasizing the importance of exposing U.S. students to the world’s fastest-growing religion.
A high school geography teacher in rural Augusta County asked students to try their hand at writing the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith, in Arabic calligraphy. The task, community reaction to it, and a sudden influx of outrage from around the country — including angry emails, phone calls and threats to put the teacher’s head on a stake — led the school district to close rather than risk disruption or violence.
The county, in the Shenandoah valley west of Charlottesville, Va., is the latest to wrestle with how Islam should be portrayed in the classroom and how students should learn about it. It’s a subject that has become increasingly fraught as concerns about Islamophobia have grown alongside fears of extremist violence and terrorism.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Virginia is like the American mecca, isn’t it?
Gee, why can't these mean-old heathens just bend over for us? Nothing wrong with a little Allah in the morning!
Why that's easy? Remember Slavery in America? ISLAM created it and supplied the slaves.
Put that in your history books and smoke it!
WaPo would be the first to complain and back the ACLU filing suit if the same students were required to acknowledge Christ as King.
All the latest fashions, I suppose...
“The county, in the Shenandoah valley west of Charlottesville, Va., is the latest to wrestle with how Islam should be portrayed in the classroom and how students should learn about it.”
They should learn the unvarnished truth, that it’s a murderous cult, that this country (U.S.) was founded on Judea-Christian ideals and the murderous cult of islam is not welcome here.
So they closed all the schools on a Friday.
Saaaaaaay . . .
Isn’t that the islamists so called holy day.
Why is it in Virginia's statewide academic standards to learn about world religions?
That is not something which Virginia should be teaching anyone.
It is not even compatible with basic US law. The word "equality" is utterly meaningless in Islam.
In Islam, society is one big pecking order from the lowest slave up to Allah. No one is equal to anyone. Each has their status and must REMAIN in their status.
“and educators emphasizing the importance of exposing U.S. students to the world’s fastest-growing religion.”
Shut it down. Shut the whole damned school down. If anyone dared do this about Christianity, the whole Federal government would swing into a vicious attack on that school. Moslems are being treated superior.
TRUMP 2016
It is not that the teacher chose Arabic for calligraphy, it is what was chosen. In the entire script & language, it is an innocent mistake that the ‘declaration of faith’ was chosen? Time to find a new job, you have no place in education here!
Imagine if they had taught algebra.
Good. It’s about time parents forced a system to close when the assignments are garbage that warps students’ minds.
Does anybody think the school would have considered, even for a moment, having the kids write, "Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no man comes to the Father but by me?"
I’m unaware of any algebra lessons that involve the shahada. Your math classes must have been way different than mine.
“A high school geography teacher in rural Augusta County asked students to try their hand at writing the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith, in Arabic calligraphy.”
Dollars to donuts behind the scenes the obama administration was directly responsible for this. This was no accident.
Here in Missouri the 6th-grade world geography/history text did cover the major religions—Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam and the major tenets of each. So, I covered Islam as well. But I had to explain that “jihad” meant a bit more than just the struggle to “get right with allah” and that despite what their textbook said, women were treated little better than dirt in the really “pious” Islamic nations. I tried not to lie to my students.
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