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ABC News' Terry McCarthy has been reporting on war, peace, and everything in between from all around the world for 20 years. He writes about daily life in the areas he is reporting from.
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TWO ROADS DIVERGE
December 10, 2007 4:57 PM
We flew to Jordan last week from Baghdad to see another face of the US in the Middle East – and how young Arabs’ lives can go in such totally different directions, depending on what they are exposed to in their teens.
In Iraq 160,000 US troops are engaged in a lethal battle with insurgents, militias and criminal gangs for control of a blood-smeared battlespace. Across the border in Jordan, 45 minutes south of Amman in the newly opened King’s Academy boarding school US education principles are engaged in bringing young Arab boys and girls to adulthood with a good chance of getting into a top US university and a broadly tolerant and benign view of the world. It is two very different faces of the same coin.
The King’s Academy is the pet project of King Abdullah of Jordan, who was sent by his father, then King Hussein, to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in the 1980’s. The young prince had the time of his life with the other prep school boys (it turned co-ed some years after he left) playing sports, studying literature and interacting with a relatively liberal faculty in the pastoral New England countryside.
After he took over from his father, King Abdullah decided to modernize Jordan’s education system, and in addition to revamping public schools, he decided to recreate Deerfield – in the desert. 600 students from around the Middle East, boys and girls mixed (that in itself is revolutionary – there are no other mixed boarding schools anywhere in this region), studying an American curriculum with teachers who were half local, half from the US.
Some in the region thought it could not get off the ground – but in September the King’s Academy opened with its first 100 students, half in 9th and half in 10th grade, including girls. They came from Saudi, Dubai, Egypt, Kuwait, Cyprus and Jordan. As I walked around the campus, barely an hour’s flight from the war in Iraq, I couldn’t stop thinking of the irony of it all: these 14 and 15 year olds, along with their parents, were buying in to America by attending this school. Most that I talked to wanted to move on to a US university, become doctors, engineers, people with something to offer to their society. Across the border young men their age were still being recruited for a couple of hundred dollars to plant roadside bombs, to shoot at American or Iraqi government soldiers, or to strap explosives to their bodies and walk into a crowded market to cause maximum carnage. Same kids, same culture, different role of the dice.
One thing that was very interesting was how the boys and girls interacted at King’s Academy. In traditional societies in the Middle East – particularly in Saudi Arabia – boys and girls are kept strictly apart by religious police and other arbiters of conservative social custom. In the King’s Academy, where the only overseers are open-minded teachers, the male and female students were pleasantly liberated – to be themselves. There are firm regulations about keeping dormitories separate, and public displays of affection like hand-holding and kissing are banned, but apart from that the boys and girls ate together, studied together, chatted in mixed groups in the courtyards. After spending an entire day on the campus it became clear to me precisely how visionary the school is. These boys and girls, many of whom will go on to become leaders in their own countries, will bring with them an open-minded attitude and a network of friends from different countries in the region that is the direct opposite to the closed-mind extremism of the young men crossing into Iraq to blow themselves up as suicide bombers. And I dare say that is one of the goals the King of Jordan has in mind with his school.
December 10, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (0)
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