A school district in Pennsylvania (USA) is offering Hindi, official language of India, to its pupils from the next semester.
Students in this course offered by Bensalem Township School District (BTSD) will reportedly learn speaking and writing Hindi and expressing themselves in Hindi. They will be taught “conversational Hindi using authentic written and visual materials” and will be “consistently engaged in interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes of communication”.
Welcoming this development, Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, applauded BTSD for introducing Hindi to high schoolers and urged school districts around the country to offer Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, etc., in their schools.
Rajan Zed, who is Chairperson of Indo-American Leadership Confederation, further said that besides learning the rich languages and culture of India, it would also make a good business sense to open-up the American children to these as India was on track to become a global power. Moreover, USA being a culturally diverse society, introducing languages of India would bring more cohesiveness and harmony in the communities. In addition, American children of India-descent would be able to keep their languages, traditions and culture alive and intact, Zed added.
Hindustani is reportedly the fourth highly spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish and English and has more speakers than Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, etc.
This Hindi course will be offered as an elective for students who have completed two years of another language at the high school level, according to Sharon Doyle, Bensalem High School principal’s secretary, who adds that if it does well, then a higher-level course in Hindi might also be added. Besides English, District already offers Spanish, French, Japanese and Latin.
Heather D. Nicholas, Kim J. Rivera and Yagnesh S. Choksi are President, Vice President and Member of School Board respectively; while Dr. David E. Baugh and Dr. Monica McHale-Small are Superintendent and Assistant Superintendent of BTSD whose Mission includes: "provide a first class education for the whole child”. It has about 6300 students and about 85% of its graduates go for higher education.
Bensalem Township in Pennsylvania, established 1692, is known as "Community of Firsts", “A Model for America” and “1 of 100 Best Communities in the United States to Raise Children”. Joseph DiGirolamo is the Mayor of this town, which is home to Philadelphia Park Racetrack and Mongkoltepmunee Buddhist Temple. Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of USA, often travelled to Bensalem and M. Night Shyamalan movie Signs was partly shot here
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