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Most schools don't do the pledge. Plus, "under God" leaves it open to interpretation.......just like AA.
Is this true? I live in a very liberal area, and every school I know of around here says the pledge every single morning. I find it so hard to believe that this is a rarity. Also, I know from experience that the "under God" part is a bit of a challenge to explain to children who are clever and are being raised atheist. We've settled on telling our children that they can just leave that part out, since it wasn't even in the pledge until the mid 1950's.
How can you guarantee this? My middle schooler already knows quite a bit of what you've listed here, and he's learned it in public school. Now, penmanship is not one of the things on the list that he has mastered, but a) even the nuns in my past were not able to lead the majority of boys I went to school with to penmanship mastery and b) I really can't think of any benefit I've seen in my life from all of the hours I spent mastering penmanship, other than the compliments and (more often) gentle ribbing I get from the guys I work with when I sign an office card. The point of the calligraphy assignment was not to practice calligraphy, but to expose them to the most important art form in the Middle East.
Good Point
In the Islamic World Calligraphy is the prominent art form and the art of a nation is an excellent view of the culture of a nation.
Is this true? I live in a very liberal area, and every school I know of around here says the pledge every single morning. I find it so hard to believe that this is a rarity. Also, I know from experience that the "under God" part is a bit of a challenge to explain to children who are clever and are being raised atheist. We've settled on telling our children that they can just leave that part out, since it wasn't even in the pledge until the mid 1950's.
Parents Fight Over Pledging Allegiance In Schools : NPR
At Brookline's Runkle School, as in most, the pledge is led once a week over the intercom.
"Nobody should be asked to stand, nobody should be asked to salute, or to place their hands over heart; they are not told how to respond," Stone says. "They are given the opportunity to hear and recite the pledge if they so choose."
After dismissal, outside another Brookline school, eighth-grader Noam Fink agrees that there is no pressure to pledge. In fact, she says, sometimes there's pressure not to pledge.
"I did it once," she says. "And I was one of three people standing up and it was awkward 'cause everyone was staring at you."
In the Islamic World Calligraphy is the prominent art form and the art of a nation is an excellent view of the culture of a nation.
Claiming God IS Allah is also Islamic culture.......not all Americans believe this. Is Islam excluded from separation of school and God? Does the claim about God, the only thing one could get that shows calligraphy?
You are missing the point.......Why do you agree with a school lesson claiming who God IS? This was a statement they were writing, not a here's your options. What happened to no God in school?
The school lesson was not throwing the weight of the state behind Allah. TMK, the students didn't even know what the target calligraphy said - until the controversy began.
& the students were not writing - I assume that none of them write Arabic, recognize the characters, can form them properly, put in the diacritics & markers for vowels, & all the other mechanics of Arabic that are out there. Arabic calligraphy is an elaborate & formalized form of Arabic. The students were copying the calligraphy, as best they could.
Common knowledge is wrong, the Supreme Court did not remove prayer from the public schools. What is prohibited is conducting state-sponsored religious practices such as prayer in school. Individuals - students, staff - are free to invoke whatever deity they please - so long as they don't disrupt the educational enterprise. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School...#United_States for a discussion of the issue.
The school lesson was not throwing the weight of the state behind Allah. TMK, the students didn't even know what the target calligraphy said - until the controversy began.
& the students were not writing - I assume that none of them write Arabic, recognize the characters, can form them properly, put in the diacritics & markers for vowels, & all the other mechanics of Arabic that are out there. Arabic calligraphy is an elaborate & formalized form of Arabic. The students were copying the calligraphy, as best they could.
Common knowledge is wrong, the Supreme Court did not remove prayer from the public schools. What is prohibited is conducting state-sponsored religious practices such as prayer in school. Individuals - students, staff - are free to invoke whatever deity they please - so long as they don't disrupt the educational enterprise. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School...#United_States for a discussion of the issue.
Why would this be hidden? Are you okay with hidden messages? They were copying a message of Islam that claims God is Allah. The Ten Commandments have been removed from schools for this very same thing.
There was a time when a very known church hid words from their people........
Claiming God IS Allah is also Islamic culture.......not all Americans believe this. Is Islam excluded from separation of school and God? Does the claim about God, the only thing one could get that shows calligraphy?
If one is studying an Islamic Nation Islamic Calligraphy is very much part of the Nation and in a non-Arabic Islamic Nation Islamic Calligraphy and Qur'anic Arabic are the only written forms of Arabic common to all Islamic nations. Arabic does differ nation to nation but the Islamic Calligraphy and Written Qur'an are the same world wide.
If some one is offended by the Shahada, I think they would be even more so by other examples of Islamic Calligraphy.
the teacher could have used the Asmāʾ Allāh al-Ḥusnā,
all Islamic Calligraphy will be religion related. As for Arabic calligraphy, none of it reflects Islamic nations.
Why would this be hidden? Are you okay with hidden messages? They were copying a message of Islam that claims God is Allah. The Ten Commandments have been removed from schools for this very same thing.
There was a time when a very known church hid words from their people........
I figure that the meaning of the Arabic calligraphy wasn't provided in the exercise because the content wasn't the point of the exercise. There are lots of hidden messages in class - in physics, there's E = mc(squared) - which is typically explained in class, but I don't know that most students grasp the meaning even then. Trying to get past those limitations is the point of class, & of education in general.
The Ten Commandments were removed from public schools because their posting there implied state approval or preference - which is not allowed anymore, since the 1950s.
Why would this be hidden? Are you okay with hidden messages? They were copying a message of Islam that claims God is Allah. The Ten Commandments have been removed from schools for this very same thing.
Because it doesn't matter. It wasn't a lesson on the teachings of Allah and the word of the Koran or whatever, the point of the lesson was to focus on the intricacy of the language itself. But at the same time, that is an important phrase religiously for Muslims, so now you're killing two birds with one stone. It's not just some useless American/English phrase translated into Arabic.
God IS Allah. God is also God. God is also Yahweh (or whatever other of the various words, in any language, Jews may use). These are all God. Some of them may not be YOUR God, but they ARE Gods that are recognized by the major world religions. The fact that I don't believe in Allah doesn't make him not a God. It just doesn't make him MY God.
The Ten Commandments may be taught in school in the context of teaching Christianity, like this was teaching Islam. A student can learn the Ten Commandments to better understand Christianity, and then they move onto another lesson, another religion. At least this is how it went in my district. However, they cannot be words for students to live by in public schools, as they would in a Catholic school. There is a difference. They cannot be taught to children and reminded of it each day. You cannot say to a child "you can't steal money from your fellow student because God says "thou shalt not steal."" Once someone says to a kid in this school in question in VA, "you can't believe in God because Allah is the only God," then we can talk.
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The limits of pack journalism
