Out of 30,000 schools in Great Britain, 160 are Muslim faith schools. Below is a deeply troubling BBC report on what some of these schools are teaching:
So this is what happens when you set out to live a segregated and parallel existence, rejecting assimilation. Below is part 2 of the report. At the 7:00 mark we learn that the official Saudi Arabian curriculum textbooks are being distributed to children in Britain and that these include such lovely bits of information for middle school-aged children as this: “Jews look like monkeys and pigs.” Isn’t that a lovely thing to teach a child in Europe 65 years after the Holocaust?:
This report makes me feel like the purchase of the following book is wholly unnecessary: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century.
Prometheus Unbound 
The US media is very pro-Muslim compared to the BBC. It makes me wonder if the difference is with the media outlets or with European vs American Muslims.
My guess is that even in England the Muslims represented in this report do not represent the mainstream practice of most Muslims living there. 95% of Muslim children in England, for example, attend non-faith based schools. But the fundamentalists there are deeply disturbing.
As for American Muslims, I believe that they are largely moderate people and I hope that they represent the future of Islam generally. A lot of the problem in England has to do with extreme community segregation. I remember the first time I was in England, visiting a grocery store near Birmingham, and seeing a completely covered group of women. It was shocking, the antifeminist presence of them. I felt as if they constituted an extremist challenge to women’s equality and democracy. I still do. You’ll know that the promise of a more moderate Islam is failing when you start seeing equivelent isolated communities of completely covered women in the United States. I have yet to encounter it among local Muslims in northern Los Angeles County, though you frequently see the hijab. The hijab is a conservative covering of the hair, but at least it is not the public erasure of a woman as an individual.
—Santi
Homeschoolers may say ‘fair enough’ don’t they?
Gato,
I used to be more sympathetic to home schooling than I am now. I think it’s generally bad for kids regardless of the parent’s religious (or irreligious) orientation. The reason is that it is based on a generalist model of society, and everything else in contemporary society requires specialization. Home school parents, often poorly educated themselves, imagine themselves as capable of being a “jack of all trades,” teaching kids history, science, literature, etc.
Invariably, the child gets shortchanged in all these specialized fields. There’s a reason that people specialize: it’s because it is efficient to do so.
—Santi
There’s a broader issue if you think about civillization/nation building. A commom education background is one of those fundamental things (ideally speaking), that help to make people feel they belong to, are part of something bigger. The Nation/Country. Homeschooling, specially the religious motivated one, sounds to me as a step backwards into some kind of tribal thing. Which in the long term can be disastrous for a country’s integrity. More and more people will see themselves not as part of the USA, but as part of their tribe inside the US, or they will pretend that their tribe alone is what “America” really is. And as this homeschooling necessarily is worst in quality, those children will have less and less perspectives of improvement, as they’ll lack the knowledge and skilss needed in the 21st century, and so they’ll be more and more resentful.
Not a good prognostic.
Gato,
You said it well and admirably, and I agree with you.
—Santi
These madness has been spreading in the Islamic world. Since it is mostly in Arabic, only those who can read Arabic will appreciate the darkness descending on this world through radical Islam. Here’s just a simple offering by “the religion of peace” which happened yesterday.
Protester killed as Egypt Christians clash with police
By Samer al-Atrush (AFP) – 13 hours ago
CAIRO — One demonstrator was killed and dozens injured on Wednesday as Christian protesters clashed with Egyptian police over the refusal of permission for a new church, a security official said.
The clashes came amid mounting sectarian tensions in the Arab world’s most populous nation after Muslims set fire to homes owned by the family of a Christian man rumoured to have flirted with a Muslim girl in the south.
A security official told AFP that a young male demonstrator was killed during the protests over the church and that a senior police officer was among the injured.
A crowd of around 150 people had clashed sporadically with police through the morning in the Talibiya district of the capital Cairo, with demonstrators throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, and the police responding with tear gas.
Several police and 12 soldiers were injured in the clashes as well as around 15 demonstrators.
Some of the protesters were led away with blood on their faces, after police hurled rocks at them from a bridge, the security official said, adding that more than 20 people were arrested.
He identified the dead man as Makarios Jad Shukr, 19. Witnesses said he was shot at around 6:30 am (0430 GMT) as demonstrators tried to approach the proposed site of the new church.
“People here feel very discriminated against. We can’t build the church — why are they stopping us?” asked Samih Rashid.
“Every street has a mosque, every church has a mosque next to it,” he complained.
More than 20 young Muslim men shouting anti-Coptic slogans threw rocks at the demonstrators under a bridge on the ringroad where some of the police fired tear gas at the Copts.
“This is the way the government starts sectarian strife,” said one of the demonstrators, who were heard chanting: “With our blood and with our souls we will sacrifice our lives for you, oh Cross.”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i8m4SrBZZ_k5oymqygfqDypiWaaQ?docId=CNG.38e1dc44f823cc3b1c8604ec5f26e3b0.2f1
And here’s how life under Islamic rules will be.