Posted by Howard Richman on March 26 2008 at 09:13:02:
An article by Neil MacFarquhar reports the many reasons that Muslims homeschool their children. Although some do so for academic reasons, he noted that that in the Lodi region of California most homeschool daughters in order to isolate them once they reach puberty. Here is a selection:
LODI, Calif. — 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.HowardHer 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.
“Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes — they don’t think it is a good thing for girls,” said Miss Bibi, 17, now studying at the 12th-grade level in this agricultural center some 70 miles east of San Francisco. “You have to be respectable.”...
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...
“I do miss my friends,” Miss Bibi said of fellow students with whom she once attended public school. “We would hang out and do fun things, help each other with our homework.”
But being schooled apart does have its benefit, she added. “We don’t want anyone to point a finger at us,” she said, “to say that we are bad.”
Mrs. Asghar, the Stockton woman who argues against home schooling, takes exception to the idea of removing girls from school to preserve family honor, calling it a barrier to assimilation.
“People who think like this are stuck in a time capsule,” she said. “When kids know more than their parents, the parents lose control. I think that is a fear in all of us.”...
In some cases, home-schooling is used primarily as a way to isolate girls like Miss Bibi, the Pakistani-American here in Lodi....