The Holy Trinity College (Heilige-Drievuldigheidscollege, HDC) in Leuven, located in Flemish Brabant, is innovating this year by introducing the learning of Arabic into its school curriculum. This course, which will be compulsory for sixth-year secondary school pupils taking modern languages, marks a first in Catholic education in Belgium.
The Catholic establishment justifies this decision.We didn’t want to pamper our students, but to challenge them intellectually with a language that is not part of the Indo-European family.”explains Frank Baeyens, director of the college, to our colleagues at Mediahuis. He adds: “We want to show them that a language can be based on a completely different structure, with a different script and alphabet. The goal is not to make them fluent in Arabic, but to get them to approach the language from a linguistic, philosophical and cultural perspective, thus broadening their horizons“.
Frank Baeyens also stresses the importance of recruiting a teacher of Arab origin to embody a positive role model, particularly for students whose mother tongue is Arabic.Today there are too few teachers from immigrant backgrounds“, he believes.
The recent reform of secondary education in Belgium now allows schools greater flexibility in developing their annual curriculum. While some schools in the same network had already offered Korean or Swedish courses, the choice of Arabic as a compulsory subject is a first.
Arabic school Louvain
#Belgique
