Girls yanked around like so much furniture.
Like dozens of other Pakistani-American girls here, Hajra Bibi stopped attending the local public school when she reached puberty, and began studying at home. Her family wanted her to clean and cook for her male relatives, and had also worried that other American children would mock both her Muslim religion and her traditional clothes…About 40 percent of the Pakistani and other Southeast Asian girls of high school age who are enrolled in the district here are home-schooled…Some 80 percent of the city’s 2,500 Muslims are Pakistani, and many are interrelated villagers who try to recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home. A decade ago many girls were simply shipped back to their villages once they reached adolescence…As soon as they finish their schooling, the girls are married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.
How nice to know that Lodi has so much in common with Luton.
Aishah Bashir, now an 18-year-old Independent School student, was sent back to Pakistan when she was 12 and stayed till she was 16. She had no education there. Asked about home schooling, she said it was the best choice. But she admitted that the choice was not hers and, asked if she would home-school her own daughter, stared mutely at the floor. Finally she said quietly: “When I have a daughter, I want her to learn more than me. I want her to be more educated.”
Too bad Aishah can’t have what she wants for her daughter. Too bad she can’t be more educated too.
Comments
32 responses to “The news from Lodi”
Seeds of dissension are inevitably born in abundance on the jet-black sofa – which also like the Koran, in the photograph, evidently to the eye dominates the living room scene and that too of the family’s virtual “American life” reality. It is with them all black and white, and nothing else in between.
It appears that they have absolutely no intention of culturally/educationally integrating themselves into the American way of life.
How can a parent qualify to “home-school” ? On what criteria do the local authorities sanction it ?
Ophelia might want to comment on this but it seems to me that the US has taken a rather smug attitidue to the European “problems” with their Muslim monirities so far and implied that they’ve done much better.
If this sort of thing spreads that could all change quite quickly. But if you remember Waco and Georgetown it’s never been far away – just a different religion.
“How can a parent qualify to “home-school” ? On what criteria do the local authorities sanction it ?”
Like so many other things in the US, it varies from state to state and even sometimes from county to county.
Christian homeschoolers in America (who are usually motivated by protecting their children from the sins of evolution and sex ed rather than outright misogyny) can get away with the most egregious distortions of reality in their “curriculum”, though, so I see no reason why it would be significantly different for Muslims in America.
Actually, there’s a flap going on in California right now where they *gasp* barred parents without teaching credentials from teaching: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/27/BA7CVR0TG.DTL
So it seems like the legal climate in CA, at least, has been very, very lax.
In general, though, American homeschoolers (both religious and the very tiny minority of secular) will fight bitterly against anything that smacks of government interference, whether to measure performance or ensure basic competence on the part of the teachers.
Like so many other regressive policies, this is marketed to Americans under the banner of “choice”.
… and the old Roman patria potestas for which so many of the Founders died…
… and the old Roman patria potestas for which so many of the Founders died…
That wasn’t me! I *never* double-post. Damn machines!
Thanks for all that dzd; your link to SFgate is revealing
“Homeschooling (sic) advocates say 166,000 children in California are taught by at home, most of them by parents who lack teaching credentials.”
Why am I not surprised that the intolerant and unqualified can waste other people’s tax money on ludicrous court cases in the pursuit of chaining up their children’s minds ?
Sh1t, and we complain about Iran.
I do get the impression that in a country where low taxation often seems to be the most important ideological goal that farming out any socially funded provision to 3rd sector/individuals/churches is freely encouraged as it removes the borrowing requirement… (there is a strange symbiosis between free market ideology and religious fundamentalist ideology.) And all this rot is marketed shamelessly in the name of ‘diversity’, or as you say, ‘choice’.
(I don’t know where you live but to this Brit that is also a very Blairite/Brownite agenda; we’re catching up fast, and now French Premier Sarkozy wants in too.)
“why are they there in the first place?”
Greg, the owner'(s)? of the stylish “suffa” I am sure, if asked, would be very ‘economical’ with the truth of that question.
Just like to chip in on US homeschoolers…
I’ve met both types over there – the kids of assorted fundie nutjobs who don’t want to risk their precious minds being ‘contaminated’ with impure secular devilry..
..and the other sort, who were staging an open-air performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in a public park in Gallipolis, Ohio. They were a very friendly bunch, and absolutely adored Shakespeare…turned out most of ’em were homeschooled because of semi-rural travel issues + parents not keen on the low standards of their local high school [how many of us over here feel the same way, hmmm? :-) How did the Jacky Fleming cartoon put it…”Oh, we don’t send our daughter to school. We prefer the dating agency for under-age smokers”…].
Although it must be said, a fair few of the parents were qualified teachers/academics, so not exactly representative of the ‘average’.
Andy, thanks for restoring some balance there !
Yeah, I don’t mean to imply that all homeschoolers are liars for Jesus or tinfoil-hatted “GET OFF MY LAND” libertarians. But they certainly do appear to dominate the discourse in my experience.
The difference between the sane kind and the crazy kind is that the sane kind lament the poor quality of American K-12 education. The crazy kind would like to see public education abolished altogether.
d.z.d it seems to be the home school kids that win spelling bee,s,I think a lot of people in the U.S home school because they have lost all trust in public education, I cant say I blame them the teachers union fight tooth and nail against any form of teacher grading or even any hint of school choice, so parents are often faced with sending their kids to failing dangerous schools or home schooling because they cant aford private education, Although I would agree there is also a very scary bunch as well that seem hell bent on making home schooling a dirty word, this so clouds the isue that it has become a right v left isue rater than what would serve children best.
Richard
Is this another example, like vaccination, of a ‘tragedy of the commons’ whereby behaviour that is perfectly rational for the individual, e.g. giving the best education to my child, results in public decline i.e. public schools populated by children from families that don’t value education?
Except that vaccination isn’t a tragedy of the commons because, Richard to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not perfectly rational for the individual to refuse to vaccinate her child, nor does refusal to vaccinate give a child the best protection from measles.
“School choice”, as American conservatives use the term, is a code phrase for “defunding and destroying the public education system”. I would hope that teachers would oppose that!
And I see no problem with the issue being “left v. right” because the proponents of wrecking public education are, almost to a man, right wingers.
It’s really a pretty good racket the right wing has going. For the past several decades they’ve opposed attempts to improve the schools at any turn (decry the teachers’ unions and denounce attempts to adequately fund education as “throwing money at the problem”), then once the schools have decayed enough as a result of conservative social policies, start bemoaning the mess they themselves have made.
The solution to “failing dangerous schools” is not to pull people out of the failing system (thereby accelerating its collapse), it is to fix the system!
d.z.d The Blair goverment came to power with a promise to fix education, after 10 plus years and huge amounts of cash along with school choice measures education in the UK is starting to improve,you seem to sugest that it is o.k to leave kids in failing schools while simlar changes take place in the U.S, try telling that to a poor black single mother who has to send her kid to a school with a metal detector at the gate. Chris as I have said before a parents duty is to their child not society in general it is a selfish duty,so the answer to your question is yes.
http://www.wddty.com/03363800370817441035/mmr-and-autism-us-court-says-there-s-a-link-and-awards-compensation.html I am not so sure it isnt rational O.B.
Ophelia
I thought the statistical argument was that, for an individual, the risk of damage from the vaccine could be higher than the likelihood of infection but that this relationship changes for the overall population?
Of course it does Chris, the risk of infection for a child who lives on a farm in a Welsh mountain village is far less than the risk for a child that lives in an urban area yet they are treated the same with regard to vacination.
“try telling that to a poor black single mother who has to send her kid to a school with a metal detector at the gate”
Poor black single mothers aren’t homeschooling or sending their children to private schools, Richard. “Pulling children out of the schools” is only ever a realistic option for wealthy, usually white, privileged classes. But I suppose if the poor have no bread, they can always eat some cake, right?
(Don’t give me the vouchers cockamamie, either, as those would just constitute a corporate subsidy to unaccountable McSchool chains–I prefer not to regard education as a commodity to be bought and sold.)
Hell, one could argue that one of the largest problems with US public education is that it is a de facto wealth-segregated system. Of course an inner city school with no tax base to fund it is going to fucking fail, why would anybody expect something different to happen? Mammon forbid some of the rich bastards in the gated suburbs should pay a few extra dollars to help anyone else, though, that would be *gasp* Marxist!
It’s almost as if conservatives are trying to create a perpetually ignorant underclass with no hope of escaping from poverty. Funny, that.
Richard, the court was wrong in that decision. Courts can make mistakes.
Not to mention the manifest problems with taking a court ruling as a statement of scientific fact.
Also, LOL at using “What Doctors Didn’t Tell You” as a source. What next, Richard, Kevin Trudeau and the natural cures “They” don’t want us to know about?
It would be nice if liberals would suport the principal of vouchers then my single black mother could send her kid to private school just like white people do d.z.d but no lets leave her kid trapped in a failing dangerous school while endless arguments over funding that never arives will make it better for her, who cares if we loose a generation!
I didnt say the court decision was scientific fact d.z.d just troubling,O.B that seems a bit like shooting the mesanger? courts can be wrong, you mean O.J. might realy be guilty.
Also d.z.d that would be marxist and would like marxism fail.
No, Richard, my saying that courts can be wrong was not like shooting the messenger, it was a quick way of pointing out that a court decision doesn’t make the point you were using it to make, which was that it’s perhaps not irrational for parents to refuse to vaccinate their children.
Regarding the MMR vaccine and its (non)link to autism, Quackwatch has a good page up:
http://www.quackwatch.org/03HealthPromotion/immu/autism.html
There’s also a recent New Scientist piece which details research that “should put the final nail in the coffin of the claim that the MMR vaccine is responsible for the apparent rise in autism in recent years”:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7076