American-Style Prep School Comes To Jordan

King Abdullah II Builds School Modeled After His Alma Mater, Deerfield Academy

(CBS)  The leafy glades of a New England prep school are an educational dream world to some. It's a dream one student took and built somewhere else, CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports.

That graduate was a clean-cut, blazer-and-school-tie type — a tough-looking little wrestler in the class of 1980. Now he is Abdullah II, King of Jordan.

"I am sure this is a bit of nostalgia in it," says Safwan Masri, chairman of Kings Academy.

So Deerfield Academy, King Abdullah's alma mater, in the hills of Western Massachusetts has been cloned as Kings Academy, in the scrubland of the Jordanian dessert. It will open for business next year under a former Deerfield headmaster.

Whatever King Abdullah's nostalgia for his school days, the fact is there is a crisis in education in the Arab world. By almost all measures of literacy and modern technical skills, Arab societies lag far behind. The new school isn't about nostalgia; it's about the future.

It's about trying to pull an education system — in many cases based on Koranic teachings and breeding suspicion of the West — up by its bootstraps and into the 21st century. It's about trying to build bridges between clashing cultures.

"The clash, I think, is a superficial clash. There is a lot more that is common between the cultures, the West and the East," says Masri, though he acknowledges it doesn't seem that way lately.

The kids — ambitious ones from well-to-do families, at least — want to come. For kid reasons, of course.

"The boarding school idea, I really like," says one student, laughing when asked if it's just a way to get away from his parents.

Maybe that culture gap isn't quite as wide as it seems.

[malik76-2009]

This was a terrible article that further promotes the stereo-typical image the US media tries to force regarding the Arab World. Jordan prides itself on its literacy rate that surpasses many developed contries. King's Academy will be a great addition to the system but great schools already exist in Jordan. I have never seen a single school "based on Koranic teachings and breeding suspicion of the West" in Jordan. The images shown in the news report also misrepresent the true situation of the majority of students there. I noticed the reporter referred to the "Arab World" when making his generalized statements, though he is reporting from Jordan about a a Jordanian school... among other things, the education system in each Arab country varies significantly. So if you were to take Sudan or Somalia, I'm sure some of the statements are true but in the context of this report, as a Jordanian that greatly values his education in Jordan, I find this report very insulting and another case of very poor, agenda-driven US journalism.