Concerned With Public Education

I was watching Jeopardy yesterday and the final question had to do with a country in Africa. As I searched the random knowledge bank in my head I realized I know little to nothing about African countries, let alone other places around the world. This brought me to think about my public school upbringing where we covered American history in depth and Western European history haphazardly. Even in my high school World Studies class we very briefly (maybe a class period at best) covered the Middle East. I always thought of Islam as this scary, foreign religion that should be feared because that’s how it was presented at school. Once I got to college i was shocked to discover how not only peaceful but similar Islam is to Christianity. I wonder why the Islamic religion and the Middle East is shown in such a bias light in high school. I think the public education system needs to reconcile this lack of information about not only the middle east but other places outside of the US and Europe.

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MOZAFFAR – Indeed.  On the second day of class, I gave the high speed history of the Muslim world, spanning dominant empires over the course of 1400 years.  How much did we cover in grade/high school?  About a page.  Part of the problem is that it was very taboo to speak about religion in public school.  Part of the problem is indeed that people are ignorant, and tend to fear or hate what they don’t know.

One the most influential Muslim revivalists of the past 200 years is from Africa, and I had trouble finding a good book we could study on him.