I’m cleaning out my in-box containing links to all sorts of articles I missed over many previous months. It takes a while because I’m finding all sorts of things I missed and am now reading! Sorry to any reader who wrote to us and didn’t get a response—my in-box is a mess!
Here is a blog report from way back in June that distracted me from my cleaning. Homeschooling has been a part of our family for many years, so I especially found this enlightening and had been wondering just when Muslim immigrants and refugees would find the home schooling option in America. I guess they have.
Referring to a New York Times article on Muslim homeschooling, blogger Martin Gaither comments:
In his article, MacFarquhar focuses mostly on Muslim immigrants in Lodi, California. The area is home to about 2,500 Muslims, 80 percent of whom are “interrelated” Pakistani villagers trying to “recreate the conservative social atmosphere back home.” One way of doing this is to shield their girls from American culture, especially once they hit puberty. Of the 90 South Asian girls in the district, 38 are homeschooled (in contrast to only 7 of the 107 boys).
MacFarquhar interviews two of the homeschooled girls and finds that they are being kept home so they will be able to “cook and clean” for their “male relatives” and also to avoid being shunned by others in the community. One of the students remarked, “Some men don’t like it when you wear American clothes – they don’t think it’s a good thing for girls.” Eventually, the girls are “married off, often to cousins brought in from their families’ old villages.”
Read the whole post here. He goes on to pose the question about Muslim home schooling becoming a way to avoid assimilation but also to raise jihadis.
I’m wondering, where did all the Pakistanis come from? I just checked the databases and the Refugee Resettlement Program has only admitted less than 100 Pakistanis in recent years. I would like to know through which immigration program they are entering the US.