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Qatar Reshapes Its Schools, Putting English Over Islam

(Washington Post) - Susan B. Glasser Students are learning less Islam and more English in the tiny desert sheikdom of Qatar. Prestigious American universities, such as Cornell with its medical school and Carnegie Mellon with its business school, are being lured to set up branch campuses. Last week, the country's ruler announced an even more sweeping reform for public schools, an overhaul developed by the Rand Corp. In a region where holy war is explained in public-school textbooks - "Consider the infidel your enemy," advises a Saudi text for 10th-graders - the connection between political Islam of the sort advocated by Osama bin Laden and the education offered to Persian Gulf schoolchildren has been the subject of agonizing dispute.
2003-02-07 00:00:00
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