Turning to Home Schools for Religious Reasons

Many American families have turned to home schooling as a means of controlling the curriculum and assuring that an appropriate amount of attention is drawn to Christian principles - said to be lacking in American schools.

Increasingly, Muslims are turning to home schooling for just the opposite reason - to protect their children from a school-going population that is too Christian for their children's comfort.

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.

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.

“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.”

Across the United States, Muslims who find that a public school education clashes with their religious or cultural traditions have turned to home schooling. That choice is intended partly as a way to build a solid Muslim identity away from the prejudices that their children, boys and girls alike, can face in schoolyards.

But in some cases, as in Ms. Bibi’s, the intent is also to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life...

This from the New York Times, Photo by David Kadlubowski.