Michigan State University and Dearborn public schools have received a grant from the Department of Defense to develop the first comprehensive Arabic instruction curriculum for U.S. schools. The grant, which will be approximately $1 million for the first year, have obvious ties to U.S. national security efforts.
"We realized after the end of the Cold War that the languages we were teaching are not the languages of need today," said Gail McGinn, deputy undersecretary of defense for plans. "We needed to reorient from the German, the French and the Russian into the more critical powerhouse languages of the world like Arabic and Chinese and Hindi."
All we have to say is that it's about time. While Spanish, French and German may be the most popular languages to learn in school's today, none of them will help U.S. national security efforts in the war on terror.
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