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Something’s Rotten
in Denmark Schools
One day around the beginning of October, a sixth-grade
class in Ejerlykkeskolen, a school in Odense, Denmark, was supposed to watch a
film. But five or six students made some kind of a disturbance. The details are
unclear; the point is that, in one way or another, they disrupted the class and
made it impossible for their classmates to view the film. Their teacher tried
to control them, but without success. Finally she gave up and sent them down to
the principal, a woman named Birgitte Sonsby.
Now, Sonsby, by all indications, is no ordinary school
principal. According to Poul Erik Anderson – upon whose intensive coverage of
this story, beginning with an October 18 article
in Den Korte Avis, the present
account is largely based – Sonsby has been named the best school principal in
all of Denmark. She is the head of the Odense principals’ organization. She was
recently selected over 353 other nominees for a leadership award presented by
the city of Odense. And she has been officially commended for running a school
in which students and teachers alike feel welcome. But on that day when those
five or six kids were sent to her office to be disciplined, she was unable to
do anything with them. When she tried to talk to them, they laughed in her
face. Eventually she lost her temper. And she said something that she shouldn’t
have: “I’m so damn tired of you Muslims destroying education!”
Before we proceed, a note on translation. The expletive
Sonsby used, skide, can be
translated in any number of ways, some of them a good deal stronger than
others. I’ve chosen “damn,” but the level of intensity may be better captured
by a more emphatic word, such as “goddamn,” “bloody,” or even (and this is, in
fact, probably the closest equivalent) “fucking.” And the word I’ve translated
as “destroying” was ødelægger – which
could also be rendered as “ruining” or “spoiling,” or, somewhat more mildly, as
“damaging.”
In any event, Sonsby apologized.
But that wasn’t enough for the father of one of the disruptive boys,
twelve-year-old Raacan
Mansoor. The dad, Shaib Mansoor, reported Sonsby to the police for
racism – a charge which, if sustained, could lose her her job. (Never mind that
Islam isn’t a race: that ship has long since sailed.) Mansoor later withdrew
his police complaint, but made it clear that he still wanted Sonsby fired.
After Mansoor’s accusation was reported, some people
close to the situation defended Sonsby, testifying to her good qualities while
acknowledging that she’d crossed a line. Others were quick to label her a
racist and call for her head. Yet when you get right down to it, the only thing
she’s guilty of, aside from using what may or may not be considered profanity,
is voicing a forbidden truth.
The facts are these. For many years, the number of Muslim
students in Danish schools has been steadily rising – and, as it has risen, the
quality of everyday school life in Denmark has steadily eroded. In some
schools, such as Ejerlykkeskolen, students with foreign backgrounds (the great
majority of them Muslim) now outnumber native Danes – and the consequence of
this has been a far higher level of disorder. Everyone in Denmark knows this.
Danish parents have pulled their kids out of certain
public schools – and placed them in other public schools or in private schools
– precisely because they don’t want to put them through what is increasingly
becoming a nightmare. Andersen notes that when the municipality of Copenhagen
redrew some of its school districts recently in order to place more kids from
well-off Danish families in Blågård Skole, which is two-thirds non-Danish, the
parents of no fewer than 45 percent of those kids pulled them out of the public
school system and put them in private schools.
In short, to suggest that Muslims have destroyed – or ruined, or damaged –
education in many Danish schools is only to state a fact.
On October 24, Andersen reported
that in the wake of the charges against Sonsby, the head of her school board,
Peter Julius, had written an op-ed for a local paper in which he spoke out
against what he called the “tyranny of silence” surrounding the terrorizing of
teachers and students in many schools by “maladjusted and ill-mannered
bilingual students.” (“Bilingual students,” by the way, has become the Danish
euphemism of choice for “Muslim students.”) These kids, Julius wrote, lack “the
norms and values needed to succeed in a regular Danish school.” They call their
teachers “whores” (ludere),
harass and threaten them, and make routine accusations of racism (when, for
example, a teacher tells them “to take their feet down from a sofa or a
table”). Every day, it gets worse, inch by inch. “At some point the other
children start to view them as role models.” And “every day our staff struggles
to make room for good education.”
Andersen, to his credit, has not let go of the Sonsby
story. On October 29, he reported
that she isn’t the only one who’s “damn tired” of Muslim kids destroying
education. So, it turns out, are the parents of many other students at
Ejerslykkeskolen, whose anger over the “sabotaging” of their kids’ education
predates the incident in the principal’s office. Indeed, in response to
complaints by many of those parents, and threats by them to take their kids
elsewhere, the school board, at a meeting on September 25 – days before Sonsby
lost it – discussed the possibility of placing Danish and non-Danish students
in separate classrooms. On October 12, the school board asked the city’s Board
of Education for permission to do just that. That’s just how bad things have
gotten.
Danish schools have been sliding down this slope, of
course, for a long time. Andersen cites a report from 1992 – twenty years ago!
– warning about the rise of precisely these problems in Danish schools. Frank
in a way that European government reports about such matters can rarely afford
to be nowadays, the report took immigrant-group parents to task for their
“ignorance, indifference, and laziness,” and lamented their habit of
“using/misusing Islam as the law over Danish law,” noting that Islam was “a
constant obstacle to reasonable integration/assimilation.” Yes, Denmark has
been a model for other European countries when it comes to reforming disastrous
immigration and integration policies. But the current situation in Danish
schools provides a helpful reminder that all these things are relative. Even
the star of the class, in this case, is less than impressive. For all Denmark’s
reforms, that country’s schools have deteriorated in exactly the ways that that
1992 report warned about. Today, to acknowledge out loud the state of affairs
so bluntly outlined in that report twenty years ago is grounds for dismissal
from a teaching job.
To read Sonsby’s story is to feel extraordinary empathy
for her. She’s done a magnificent job in the face of challenges that most of
the bureaucrats above her have tried to ignore for years – and the moment she
slipped up, in the slightest of ways, some of them were quick to throw her to
the wolves. But to read this story is also to reflect on that troublemaking
kid’s father, Shaib Mansoor. Not only was he quick to run to the police
screaming “racism.” On Friday, Danish state TV reported
new complaints by Mansoor, who revealed that in a meeting with him after the
Sonsby incident, a school official said that Muslim students do cause problems – Mansoor’s reaction to
which is to complain “that schools distinguish between Muslim and Danish
students” and that the problem in the schools (which Mansoor identifies not
with kids like his son but with people like Sonsby) goes even higher up than
the principal level. Mansoor pointed a finger at municipal officials.
Plainly, Masoor has learned to play Danish society like a
maestro. His ranting obscures the fact that, as Andersen points out, the kind
of behavior that pushed Sonsby over the line would never be tolerated for an
instant in most schools in the Muslim world. In such schools, respect is all,
and an unruly kid risks corporal punishment. If a typical Muslim father in a
Muslim society were to find out that his son acted up in class and received a
good beating for it, he would, in all likelihood, accept it, probably even
approve. Respect must be enforced.
But Denmark is another story. Danish values, Danish
culture, Danish law, the Danish educational system: in the eyes of many a
Muslim in Denmark, these things deserve no respect whatsoever. They’re simply
there to be exploited, as effectively as possible, for whatever personal gain
one can wring out of them. Those Muslim kids who dared to laugh in Sonsby’s
face have been taught from infancy that someone like her – an infidel, a woman
– is their inferior, deserving of nothing but contempt and abuse. “Some of
these boys,” a teacher told
Ekstrabladet the other day, “are brought up like little kings, and
no woman – aside from their mother – is supposed to tell them anything.”
Certainly that’s the take-away from the behavior of Raacan Mansoor and his
friends, and that of Shaib Mansoor, too – whose first instinct, instead of
getting Raacan in line and showing some respect for the brat’s teachers, was to
try to destroy Birgitte Sonsby’s life.
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