Scrubs and Language

IWPR has an interesting story shedding light on the linguistic situation in northern Iraq through the experiences of Arab med students in Kurdistan. A core issue seems to be the fact that Kurds have to learn Arabic, but Arabs generally haven't learned Kurdish. I think in the future the Iraqi educational system should require some knowledge of both Kurdish and Arabic, regardless of the primary language of instruction in a given region. It would be interesting to see how this situation compares with that in Quebec, where east of Montreal I ran into a number of people who didn't know English, even if they had had some in school.