From Deutsche Welle
Since the start of the school year, Islamic religious instruction has been offered at selected schools. However, very few children are receiving the classes due to a serious shortage of teachers.
Huseyin Cetin teaches Islamic religious instruction in Marxloh, a heavily Muslim section of Duisburg in the Ruhr Valley industrial region of Germany. North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), where Duisburg is located, is the first state in Germany to offer Islamic religious instruction. But the introduction of the classes has been bumpy. There are 100,000 Muslim elementary school children in NRW, but there are only enough teachers to instruct 2,000 pupils.
The problem was expected. It will take some time to provide blanket coverage across the state, admits Sylvia Löhrmann, the NRW education minister. “But what is the alternative? We could not have trained the teachers before knowing whether we were going to have the classes in the first place,” she said, adding that there first had to be the legal foundation, which meant introducing the classes incrementally.
Pupils’ knowledge varies
What’s more, courses to train Islam teachers at German universities have only just begun. The first graduates from the University of Münster won’t be ready until the spring of 2017.
Huseyin Cetin teaches second graders in Marxloh, as one of 40 qualified Islam religious instruction teachers in NRW. He studied theology and earned an education degree from Uludag University in Turkey. He has been working as an Islam teacher in a variety of pilot projects since 1999.
Prior knowledge of Islam varies widely among the school children, says Cetin, depending on how often they attend classes at their local mosque. How much they already know also depends on what country they, or their parents, come from. “Our job is to harmonize these different levels of knowledge and to correct the wrong information they have,” he told DW, adding that the instruction fulfilled an important function in this regard.
