Secondary school in Leuven begins Arabic lessons

A Catholic school in Leuven has decided to introduce Arabic to its modern languages curriculum for final-year students, in what is reported to be a first in Flanders.

Holy Trinity College Preparatory School in Leuven will make Arabic mandatory for pupils in the sixth year of secondary school in modern languages, just as Dutch, French, English, Spanish and German are.

“The aim is not for [students] to learn to speak Arabic fluently,” said Frank Baeyens, the school’s headmaster. “It's more of a philosophical and cultural language. It's about opening up their horizons.”

The decision is largely linked to the modernisation of secondary education, which allows schools to offer the teaching of modern languages alongside a limited number of hours of Latin, economics, science or mathematics.

A certain number of hours can be filled by courses chosen by the schools themselves.

“We wanted to challenge our pupils intellectually with a language that doesn't belong to the Indo-European group,” Baeyens said.

“We want to show them that a language can be structured in a completely different way, with a different script and different signs.”

Baeyens also stressed the social importance of the project.

“A group of pupils have Arabic as their mother tongue,” said Baeyens. “The presence of a teacher with Arabic roots, who could serve as a role model for these pupils, would be an enormous added value.

"Pupils can draw inspiration from someone who has a certain social standing, who has continued their studies. Today, there are too few teachers with a migrant background.”

Photo: Sally V/Wikimedia. Licensed under Creative Commons