Originally a comment by Robert Smythson on Meeting the needs.
“At the end of the day we have a school that has 90 to 95% Muslim children, we meet their needs”.
This statement is really the key to the whole issue. I’ve lurked here for a fair old time, but I hope I might be able to contribute something, having taught workshops at one of the “Trojan horse” schools in Birmingham.
I found that in a nominally secular school where the majority of pupils are Muslim, the efforts made to “meet their needs” created a culture which accepts these “needs” as normal and this had conspicuous effects on the relationship between male and female pupils. When we “meet the needs” of children who have been brought up to believe that it is normal that man have hegemony over women, then we simply allow them to act out their poisonous beliefs.
The boys did not mix with the girls, though there was no segregation practiced by the staff.
The boys paid no attention to the female staff.
The girls only talked amongst themselves.
The girls would not proffer answers to questions.
The boys regulated the girls’ behaviour by shouting them down.
Allegedly there was a problem with girls disappearing at “marriageable” age.
If you accommodate the hijab in such a school, then it becomes abnormal not to wear it if you are a Muslim girl.
It doesn’t even take a great uniformity of belief amongst the pupils; just that enough over-indulged boys are allowed to set the tone and cow the rest into living their way. The girls are silent on the matter, so who knows or cares what they think. The children operated in their own, self imposed, self policed culture. No outside pressure from islamists is needed (and may indeed be fictitious). They have been raised to believe this is the way things should be; and have never been challenged by staff who attempt in good faith to accept and accommodate their needs.
I’d be very reluctant to blame the staff for this. They work in an extremely difficult environment and struggle generally heroically against a tide of low expectation, little support, inadequate facilities and insufficient money. I can’t imagine any of them would feel it was their place to tell the assembled school that most of their deeply held beliefs were both crazy and wrong.
(Hence, actually, the conflicting narratives from staff and the government can be resolved by realising that even if the staff were doing great things in terms of raising attainment, this doesn’t mean that they aren’t operating in a culture in which the nastier elements of conservative religion thrive.)
If you think this is only Muslim problem: look to the revelations about faith-based institutions in Ireland. This can happen anywhere the most misogynistic elements of religion are allowed to go unchallenged – they become normal.
Thank you for amplifying me. A great honour. I hope I made it clear how I feel: that even with the majority acting with the best of intentions, this way of treating people can gain a foothold and pass without challenge.
If you are a Muslim in a largely Muslim school – but which is, itself, in a largely non-Muslim country – your ”needs” are the skills to live in that country, not to have the ”needs” already fulfilled by your family and your community. Those aren’t ”needs”, they are ”wants” – and it’s largely the parents’ ”wants”, not the kids.
The whole issue smacks of the days when disabled kids were shunted off to special ”needs” schools where they’d only get to mix with kids who shared their disability. That failed kids with disabilities so why should it work with religious kids?
I’m glad you did de-lurk, Robert Smythson.
For the education nerds, just a couple of notes on how this has been building up to an explosion for decades. Immigrants coming into a country would tend to live close to eachother for a sense of security if nothing else. In the UK this effect was amplified by the chronic shortage of housing so ten years down the line you’ve got a de facto ghetto. When the families became economically secure they found it difficult to spread, even to another part of the same town. That’s when action should have been taken, not to deny anyone their religion, their customs or their family relationships and certainly not to move people about forcibly like packages. Much could have been done to prevent the development of 95% Muslim schools in communities which are at most 20%-30% Muslim. There were a lot of lazy bureaucrats and a handful of Miss Jean Brodies whose concentration was on “my girls” to the exclusion of the general good.
Examples – when I was a school governor in a deprived inner city area with a high proportion of recent immigrants we had funding for extra senior staff and invested those people in making early contact with the families of incoming 11 year olds, to explain how the school worked, assure them they would be welcome within the school itself and deal with minor misunderstandings as they arose. It worked pretty well. Then someone took the funding away, with predictable results.
And then there are the times, too numerous to recall, when there has been a “scandal” in a particular school or town. Someone has been called in to investigate, abnormal degrees of cultural segregation have been identified as a cause – usually alongside insufficient funds for new initiatives – but by the time the poor person reports the story is off the front page and nobody can be arsed – looking at you, Tony Blair – to ensure anything useful is done.
Here is Ted Cantle, musing on the time that happened to him – http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/03/faith-schools-religious-discrimination-boundaries
I found the post interesting and helpful. I do think it highlights the fact that the problem is not gender segregation per se (or what people wear), but the behaviour of students and the difficulty addressing it. You can in fact imagine best meeting these children’s educational and developmental needs by increasing gender segregation: creating separate boys and girls schools or classrooms – provided the state will guarantee the quality of girls’ education. That becomes increasingly uncertain with the free schools system. (BTW, I don’t like gender segregated schools, but as I keep saying, they’ve been with us for a long time).
I also like Maureen Brian’s comment which highlights the fact that dealing with cultural diversity involves real work and so requires real money. Our successive governments seem determined to get our mixed communities to fail by making as little provision for our needs as possible. In fact many of their policies tend to promote failure: austerity, privatisation, …
I followed Maureen’s link and can confirm what it says about the tendency of free and faith schools to segregate communities from my own experience of ‘parental choice in education’ in Britain’s most diverse neighbourhood: The real enemy here is the free school system and state supported faith schools, regardless of their faith. They result in the segregation of communities, or at least the children of communities. Voluntarily yes, but it’s still bad for all of us.
This. State support for faith schools (of any faith) is actively working to increase ghettoisation in the UK. We all pay in, and we get something which is harmful to all of us – especially to girls and women being pressured to accept seclusion, and to girls being forced into second-class status in their own education. (and boys being encouraged to look down on girls and women all the more, instead of maybe being encouraged to at least consider behaving like a decent human being).
Incidentally, it occurs to me that non-Brits may find the term “free school” confusing in this context.
Correct me, ye who are a damn sight better-informed (of whom there are a lot) but “free schools” here are a relatively new category of state school (ALL state schools are free of charge; the “free” in the name here refers to the fact that this new lot are free to do pretty much what the hell they please) where any group/company/millionaire stumps up a pathetic 10% of the cost of setting up a new school, the state coughs up the other 90% but the school is exempt from the checks and oversight of the Local Educational Authority.
Religious groups love ’em. We have two openly creationist ones, thanks to millionaire used-car-salesman Peter Vardy. It’s heart-breaking.
Incidentally, it occurs to me that non-Brits may find the term “free school” confusing in this context.
Also ‘faith schools’. The current scandal concerns schools which are not ‘faith schools’ but which are mainstream secular state schools which happen to be attended by kids who are mainly from Muslim backgrounds.
There are certainly problems with faith schools and I’d like to see them abolished but there’s little point if state schools are doing the faithists’ job for them.
Yes. It’s so pervasive I’d basically forgotten that these are not technically “faith schools”. It’s appalling that schools that are supposed to be secular and non-denominational are really nothing of the kind; and they get away with it in most cases because of the unquestioned assumption that religion is something that must be “respected”.
[I’m going out for the day so probably won’t be responding to any replies.]
No. Our needs as human beings are not defined by the needs of the country or system in which we happen to be born or live. I live in a capitalist society which has its own needs – they are not mine. The only justification for the existence and continuation of nations and institutions, including education, is serving human (and other species’) needs We don’t exist for them.
The children operated in their own, self imposed, self policed culture. No outside pressure from islamists is needed (and may indeed be fictitious).
Right.
So these boys just pulled their misogyny out of thin air, out of their rear ends?
They’re just little brown third world boys devoid of agency?
Is the author suggesting Muslim boys are simply born this way?
This is an utterly ridiculous article, yet another instance of apologetics for islamic misogyny.
Something that is ‘imposed’ implies an external source. Something self-imposed is the internalisation of something that is external. What is that external element? Has anyone enough courage to say it? Can we name it? Can we define it? Can we frame it?
No!
Never!
Because islamists have forced us to internalise the fiction that assigning a name to it amounts to bigotry, islamophobia. Critical thinking about all things islamic is racism…when it isn’t outright mental illness. If you want to push back against something you have to first define it and assign it a name.
But here it must be buried in the meaningless, generic term *faith based*…Jains or jihadists…it’s all the same.
If you think this is only Muslim problem: look to the revelations about faith-based institutions in Ireland. This can happen anywhere the most misogynistic elements of religion are allowed to go unchallenged – they become normal.
And we terminate the feel-good piece with yet another deflection. It’s not just a Muslim probleme so nothing to see here…just move along.
In the case of the “trojan horse” ( scare quote tell us it’s all in our heads!) business, muslim “misogyny” ( it’s all in our heads!) is front and centre and anyone with a functioning brain ( and a set of balls) understands that it needs to be addressed immediately
All I can say is that were these school expropriations being done by Opus Dei nutters in the name of The Catholic Church, we’d have no trouble whatsoever assigning a name to the theology motivating the instigators. When Christianity is involved the generic “faith-based” can go to hell
And speaking of Catholic, this posting comes across as a desperate, last-ditch Hail Mary pass.
@10 With respect, I think you are reading too much into that sentence. I think the intended meaning is that there is no outside organization applying direct pressure to the school or indoctrination to the students. This is arising out of the culture the students bring with them to school.
I actually wonder about this. Do muslim societies actually, smile upon young boys treating female adults with contempt? Given the role of women in childcare, that seems actually dangerous, as well as loathsome. Is this a case of immigrants being more hardcore and obsessed with traditional roles and rules than people back in the old country?
Thanks all. Shatterface and opposablethumbs – I think it’s key to realise that the community the school serves matters as much if not more than the “type” of school. If believing and behaving in a certain way is how the children are brought up, it takes a concerted effort, backed by the management of the school, to go against the grain and push for (what I see as) secular values. It’s very hard (see Maureen Brian’s comment) for the staff of an institution to take a stand in this regard. Governments’ ideologically informed meddling hasn’t helped in the slightest.
Of course, in faith schools, the whole thing is made a lot more difficult as the school’s management might well support all kinds of hideousness. Equally, I went to a faith (C. of E.) primary, whose staff were very clear on issues of equality. We also had unsegregated, entirely science-based sex-ed.
The existence of faith schools is not, I tentatively suggest, the primary problem here. (I appreciate allowing the largely progressive C of E schools to continue to exist means that to ban the creepier manifestations looks like hypocrisy). To make any difference, schools of any stripe need to be places where these expressions of inequality are challenged by staff. This might set the school against the community it serves in the best interest of its pupils.
Pen makes the point that they can imagine a situation by which single-sex schools would be of benefit. I agree, actually, that removing the girls from the terrible influence of the boys might allow them to regain their own identities but this would probably be of no avail if they were shipped off to a convent school, (or Islamic equivalent thereof).
Oh, and often it’s about (and is never helped by) poverty. Duh.
Decker: No. Just no.
Yes, you got it. It is exactly the same.
The exact same thing happens in plenty of Catholic countries — Italy and much of South America, in particular. If you raise boys and girls separately and teach boys that “womens’ work” is beneath them and women exist to wait on them, then they will grow up to be nasty misogynist jerks. Of course religion has been and still is enlisted to reinforce that, which is one of the many problems with most organized religion. But if you insist on not seeing the continuum between what’s happening in Saudi Arabia and what’s happening in, say Bolivia, then it’s you who are blind.
I’d go so far as to say that, in the modern world, religion — any religion — doesn’t really “teach” anything. It just provides justification and intensity for whatever it is that people want to believe anyway — in this case, misogyny.
@9 You’re obsessing over the single word need.
One of the duties of educators is preparation of their students for life in the greater society. It’s a disservice to the children, who are still figuring out who they want to be, to do otherwise. So yes, the children of socialists should be taught how to write a resume and cover letter, the children of anarchists should be taught how the government works, and the children of religious fundamentalist should be taught how to use contraception.
Your post, while couched in the language of advocating for children is actually the argument of fanatical parents who don’t want the state interfering with their carefully crafted cloning process.
There are many aspects to this preparation for participation in society. It should include art, music, and physical education. It should include social skills like treating others with respect, participating without dominating, and disagreeing or debating without animus. It should not be a purely preparation for the job market. We in the US have all but lost site of this, unfortunately.
@ Decker
Whatever it is that’s driving you has made you inconsistent to say the least.
The agency of the boys AND the girls (who use their agency to adopt strategies adapted to their situation) is what the post largely drew attention to. If you’ve had any contact with children, of any race and culture, you will know that by the time they get to school they’re ALL doing a pretty good job of being cultural actors and agents using what they’ve learned at home. Except that they usually do it rather more crudely and brutally than adults would. Incidentally, most of these children have never seen a third world country. So what are you complaining about?
You’re upset because you think the post denies that these tendencies originally came from adults? Calm down:
1) The post remains neutral about the allegation that there was an orchestrated plot by Islamicist adult professionals to take over these and other schools and impose extremist Islamic values NOT the issue of whether the families and communities of children are transmitting values in the same way ALL human societies do.
2) Nobody doubts that muslim children derive their misogyny (and submissiveness, when girls) from their families and community. In exactly the same way as we derive our cultural traits from our families and communities, especially when children.
3) Far from not being unwilling to criticize aspects of Islamic culture, the post and most of the commentors are taking disapproval of some of those aspects pretty much for granted, and are discussing the nitty gritty of what is going on and the difficulties in addressing it. Is that better now?
4) Your comment struck me as racist largely because it seems to want to exceptionalise and dehumanise what goes on in muslim families and communities and to imply that the solution should exceptionalise and target muslims particularly while ignoring larger trends in our society. To me, the situation described in the post actually sounds like an extreme version of what goes on in most schools and workplaces and get abundantly complained about on this network. We can tackle it, but the freedoms we want to keep must be freedoms for everyone, and the restrictions we want to impose must also apply to everyone. Following that principle, the muslim community is not so exceptional that attempts to limit their choices won’t have knock-on effects for the rest of us. Possibly for the better, but it’s always as well to assess them first, isn’t it?
Decker – I agree with you, broadly. I’m sorry I didn’t make that clear. There was some suggestion that an organised group of Islamists were advocating a particular strategy to take over these schools in attempt to create little indoctrination camps. I understand that this may or may not have been the case – my point is that this would be unnecessary. The quotes aren’t around Trojan Horse to act as scare quotes – just to indicate that this is the name these schools have been given during this outbreak of media reporting on what is a deep rooted problem. It is obviously a problem inherent in Islam’s view of the status of women. What I have been advocating is that teachers must stand against the beliefs that their pupils have been raised to accept as normal. I don’t see how you can read this as “yet another instance of apologetics for islamic misogyny”.
The spotlight that has been shed on this school is just the current outbreak of scrutiny on this long-standing issue as Maureen Brian makes clear – the will of the government and media to address the issue is periodic and short-lived.
The comments move too fast! Pen makes a good point. It is like most schools and workplaces as it operates largely on peer pressure. It is not that a particular ideology has widespread and wholehearted belief, but that a refusal to stand up to the most overtly pious types leads to a shifting of the overton window of what is acceptable behaviour. What I found most noticeable was how there exists a great degree of competition to be holier (more observant) than thou. Their standards of virtue are measured on how they match up to a religious code.
That there may be instances where schools directly advocate Islamist ideology, in this particular case this was not needed for there to be a particularly poisonous social situation.
It also doesn’t help that the issue can be framed “omg tiny terrorists” for short-term media bites when it might better read “we are failing to properly socialise our children”.
The fact that the comments move too fast signals an informative and stimulating post!
SC @ 9 – I don’t see how the two can be opposed that sharply. There’s always a trade-off in living in any society or tribe or other co-operative group. Trying to survive on one’s own in the wilderness is difficult and risky [deliberate understatement], so we give up a lot of freedom to get the benefits of co-operation. Yes that does mean we have to do a certain amount of adjusting and giving way. We have to do extra amounts of that if we immigrate to a new country. Yes, we can refuse, but that has costs.
Of course you’re right that “The only justification for the existence and continuation of nations and institutions, including education, is serving human (and other species’) needs” but human needs compete with each other, so saying that in no way rules out the need – yes need – to compromise, adjust, bargain, etc.
But if you insist on not seeing the continuum between what’s happening in Saudi Arabia and what’s happening in, say Bolivia, then it’s you who are blind.
When you make blanket statements like that you merely undermine your case.
You know, a hugely disproportionate number of upper class Muslims girls in South Asia and the middle East are educated in Catholic convent schools . Benazir Bhutto, for example, was educated by Irish nuns. Her parents would not send her to a madrassah because they knew just how unpleasant and demeaning the experience would have been for her.
I’m not making a case for the wonders of a Roman Catholic education; I,m simply pointing out that your continuum is pretty much a fiction.
I don’t deny that Bolivian women have it pretty hard, but I’d also have to say that no small amount of their hardship is due to abject poverty rather than misogyny. At least Bolivian girls are required by law to attend school and to acquire an education
Poverty cannot be used as an excuse for gender inequality in oil rich Saudi Arabia, a country that forbids women from even driving a car and a country in which girls can be legally prevented from getting an education. There are men in S.A. whose mothers are so sequestered and segregated, that they’ve never even seen their faces. These women aren’t just oppressed, they’re erased.
And so when you draw equivalences between ALL religions you are being blinded to some very crucial and important differences between belief systemes. By claiming it’s a one size fits all scenario, you end up masking and burying the worst forms of misogyny. In fact, you run interference for that misogyny
I attended gender-integrated Catholic schools run by Gray Nuns. In the upper grades when puberty hit, any smart-assed boys making snide comments about female anatomy were disciplined on the spot. I can remember two instances in particular where boys were subjected corporal punished, meted out by the nuns, for using sexist, misogynistic language when referring to girls…and their bodies.
Once again I say that NOT to compliment Roman Catholics, but to merely point out the enormous differences in gender inequality between the religious schools I attended and those schools involved in the trojan horse business where girls are sidelined, marginalised and even shouted down for being assertive.
Once again, I’m NOT defending one religion over an above others. All religions are crap, it’s just that some are much crappier than others when it comes to the treatment of women.
Some old fashioned left wingers would have said that what these children need is liberating from the oppressive ideology that their parents have inculcated in them. Sadly many modern left wingers are reluctant to say anything bad about certain oppressive ideologies.
I agree with this, and my comment was unclear in this respect.
Comment submitted:
@20.”And so when you draw equivalences between ALL religions you are being blinded to some very crucial and important differences between belief systemes” is not true. No-one is refusing to acknowledge that Islam has a particular problem with women. Drawing parallels does not preclude us from recognising differences in degree as you seem to be suggesting.
The language of “needs” doesn’t really get us very far. The needs which are being met are, indeed, things we might think of as fundamental liberties: the right to pray, the right to have your dietary requirements catered to, the right to wear what you want. A school can allow for all these needs, and yet be a place where gender equality is promoted*, or it can degenerate to a situation where there is a competition to be more overtly observant, and to police those who are perceived to show insufficient piety. It is a matter of a group of pupils’ (and their parents’) values not aligning with the secular norms we would expect. The school in question was by no means a Madrasah – it was a secular state school, and the purpose of my post was to highlight how this unpleasant dynamic can operate with or without the school being nominally religious, as it occurs within the group of pupils who “share” (to whatever extent personally) this belief and these expectations of how things should be.
*Though not so completely as if there were no religion present, but we must compromise.
… though I would add that I don’t know whether or not it applies in the case of these specific schools; I don’t know if the staff and management here had any desire to go against that particular grain, and from what (admittedly little) I’ve seen it didn’t look as if they did. It looked more as if they were happy to go with the religious grain on this and/or lead further in that direction; but the general point is well made.
opposablethumbs: the feeling I got from the (I should stress) brief contact with the staff, was that their responses to the situation varied, from voiced discontent to acceptance that “this is the way things are”, to being cowed into not being able to control a class. Overall it struck me they had enough to do trying to get the pupils to learn anything and their struggles in this regard were pretty immense.
@ Robert Smythson The quotes aren’t around Trojan Horse to act as scare quotes – just to indicate that this is the name these schools have been given during this outbreak of media reporting on what is a deep rooted problem. It is obviously a problem inherent in Islam’s view of the status of women. What I have been advocating is that teachers must stand against the beliefs that their pupils have been raised to accept as normal. I don’t see how you can read this as “yet another instance of apologetics for islamic misogyny”
If that’s what you’re saying then I may have misread you. I stand corrected. It’s just tiresome to read screeds from apologists ( seamus Milne types) who deny until they’re blue in that face that any problemes exist at all.
You are probably right that the seeds of the misogyny displayed by the boys was already been planted before they began school and not inculcated by islamist headmasters and such. That said, the entryism by islamists is very real and had as its goal the maintenance of a protective wall within which this misogyny could be cultivated and propagated during. Misogynistic attitudes and practices learned at home were to be neither challenged nor corrected by school staff.
Decker – I can believe the reality of “entryism”, though, as I did not see it made manifest in this particular case I feel ill equipped to talk about it. Just down the road from where I live is a private Islamic primary school. I imagine this is a wholly different case again. My main point was that these attitudes can prosper at a school within the body of its pupils, without the express encouragement of the school authorities.
I also think it’s a bit much (not that you are doing so) to lay the resolution of a major societal problem at the feet of teachers alone.
Whose needs? Not the girls’, surely. They need an education and they’re not getting one, not the quality of education they deserve anyway. They don’t decide to be quiet and not contribute in class for no reason, such quietness is a result of learning that there will be negative consequences for speaking up. That quietness is not a need to be met by acceptance from the teachers, it’s a serious problem that should be being challenged.
It’s staggering that the school doesn’t realise that. The ‘needs’ they’re meeting are the ‘needs’ of the boys to be dominant and that’s disgraceful.
This may be out of some comfort zones but let’s look at one important aspect of culture – dress, in particular women’s dress.
The estimated 1.6 billion Muslims on the planet live in a vast number of countries. In addition, non-Muslims in some countries are influenced by local Muslim dress, as you will find among Christians in Pakistan. The religious demand for modesty is met in different parts of the worlds with the most glorious array of different fabrics, different styles, changing fashions or in everyday Iran by combining tight jeans, a three-quarter length coat and huge bright headscarves which manage not to cover much of the hair.
I have seen them in inner city London and I see them again in West Yorkshire, girls in their early teens who, we are told, have voluntarily adopted Islamic dress – there’s no such thing but never mind that for the moment.
By their strong local accents and their total familiarity with the slang and the mores of where they are these are very likely third or fourth generation immigrants. In individual cases we can find out that their mothers and even their grandmothers wore traditional dress only for festivals and weddings.
Yet here is this one, clearly of sub-Saharan African origin whose absolute right to wear the embroidered caftan and the headcloth I would, of course, defend. And here’s her friend, looks as though her family are from the subcontinent, but she’s not in shalwar kameez and dupatta, a wonderfully comfortable outfit. Why?
These girls are not theologians. They have not discovered for themselves a nobler and ever more restrictive version of the religion. Someone, somewhere is trying to direct their behaviour along a narrow channel. Either that, or someone is bullying them.
Why, otherwise, would they be walking along the street together, joshing and giggling like the usual 14-year-olds, but dressed like elderly Saudi widows?
I also think it’s a bit much (not that you are doing so) to lay the resolution of a major societal problem at the feet of teachers alone.
I agree.
Teachers are already overburdened, especially those working in schools with large numbers of foreign-born students. Their job is to teach. The establishment ( and enforcement) of school policies–dress codes and such–is the responsibility of the administrators.
Amy Clare – “That quietness is not a need to be met by acceptance from the teachers, it’s a serious problem that should be being challenged.”
I completely agree and I don’t think I’ve made that clear enough – my wish to defend the teachers can’t absolve them completely from allowing this to continue. I suspect their unwillingness to speak out is because they don’t know whether all their colleagues and the senior management and governors of the school will back them up if they get into a row with the “representatives” of the community. I think maybe the problems with the boys are much more susceptible to being solved by the normal procedures of classroom discipline than is the quietness of the girls.
I’m not sure how this all correlates with the educational achievements of both groups, (it may well not), but it is really unpleasant to witness.
Just read the Ofsted report for the school in question. Key finding: a breakdown of staff confidence in the management and governors of the school.
@ Maureen 29 – it’s funny though because the way I perceive the young women in Newham, there’s nothing remotely submissive or modest about their behaviour, their hijabs or what they wear under them. I am sure it is not ‘modest’ to pile your hair as high as you can, add some padding on top and cover it with a fancy patterned , multi-pleated headscarf. Add tight jeans, high boots, a ton of make-up and a full-blown east end accent and attitude.
But i was thinking today, I don’t really ger to see/meet those who are essentially cloistered and I don’t know how many there might be. Also, I think we are starting to see more niqabs which I don’t like. When I chat with my neighbours, I want to be able to recognise them when I see them again.
PS those of you who haven’t already noticd the Guardian’s latest may be interested.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/14/taxpayers-should-not-fund-faith-schools
As somebody said, boys raised in Muslim households learn from birth to treat women as shit. Female teachers are ignored, girls are bullied or shouted down and the sexes segregate themselves even where no segregation is prescibed.
In this situation, any girl who dares to leave the house alone or be seen in Western dress is liable to be harrassed, jostled, assaulted or raped. If the school tolerates such behaviour, even briefly, the girls will seek Islamic dress and segregation for their own protection.
My conclusion: if the parents won’t clean up their act the schools will have to beat the misogyny out of the boys later. Possibly by placing only women in positions of authority, by employing only male teachers who follow the same agenda and by making sure that every single infringement is punished. And if that fails, then literally.
I know exactly what you mean, Pen @ 33! Jeans tighter than I’d eve have got away with plus hijab could be bog standard teen rebellion but to find schools enforcing submissive behaviour is a whole different can of worms.
Penn and Maureen Brian – The Islamic school near to me in Tower Hamlets makes all its primary age (5-11) year old girls wear identical white shoulder length headscarves, and, it seems from the gallery on their website, they sit at the back of the class. They look like little nuns.
RossR @ 35 Boys behave badly therefore we should beat them? Really?
@ 35,
Even the most rabid of misogynists, if still aged under 25, is entitled to the benefit the doubt – at least until we are confident that the alternate viewpoint has actually been explained to him.
It doesn’t always “take” but then it may not “take” with any number of others who cannot use the same excuses.
@38,
Sure, I would explain it first. But since we cannot fight an entire culture from the context of a school run by people who subscribe to that culture the explanation will need to be loud, strident, repeated and backed up, if necessary with the civilized equivalent of whips and scorpions.
So let’s have secular schools, proud of their secularism and an admissions system / curriculum which cannot be subverted by notions of any child being more special than any other.
And let’s train teachers to stand up for all the children, in a society which supports them when they do.
You see, the solution could not be more simple. It’s getting it past all the vested interests – partly caused by the need of various governments to pander to pushy or deluded parents – which presents problems.
Hi Robert, I think it is very likely to correlate with educational achievement of the girls, due to the phenomenon of stereotype threat. But in any case GCSEs are only part of what a school is supposed to provide for a child – in an ideal world schools are supposed to help make children into rounded individuals who are ready to go out into the world and achieve their potential, and self confidence is such a huge part of that. Instructing pupils on how to treat others with respect should be a part of it too, as should the teaching of critical thinking skills that should provide an oasis from whatever dogmatic ideas get pushed on the children at home.
Idealistic, I know.
They may get into a row with ‘representatives of the community’ but there will be girls in those classrooms grateful to have someone on their side, I’m sure. Who is more important? Sorry, being idealistic again!
Maureen @ 40 – I am so with you there. Take 10,000 likes or whatever it is that goes on the Internet !!
Robert @ 37 – this may be a bit tangential to your comment but I wonder if one of the things that gets overlooked in these discussions are regional differences throughout Muslim Britain. Tower Hamlets and Newham could hardly be closer geographically, but politically there are some very obvious differences. I don’t know about in terms of demographics? Or culture? I know some of the northern towns are different again and strikingly different in their demographics, but I don’t get up there much.
Mind you, I’m not saying Newham couldn’t produce a Muslim school as described. It’s the sitting at the back that bothers me. Identical headscarves on primary age children are ridiculous, but you know what? So are those identical stupid checked summer dresses they make girls wear in other primary schools. It’s yet another example of ‘things we’re used to’ but they’re a recipe for scraped knees and the forced adoption of modest behaviour because even girls in the 5-11 year old bracket have learned enough not to want to expose their knickers by their choice of posture and activity. One thing about traditional Muslim dress I do approve is the trousers and tunic arrangement.
Latverian Diplomat, you’ve misunderstood my argument.
It’s a central subject of the post. If you want to make an argument about whether an education does or doesn’t meet the needs of children, you have to talk about what those needs are. You can’t just assume that any society’s needs are identical to theirs.
These statements are too general to be of use. If they refer to basic life skills (even these can be difficult to distinguish from indoctrination), they’re correct. If they refer to preparation to take their slot in a “greater society” that is unjust and educates to perpetuate itself rather than to serve human needs, then they’re highly debatable.
Neither my comment itself nor the linked post said anything about wanting education to be about indoctrination, so this amounts to a parade of straw men.
The resume-writing example is a bit silly, as this is a “skill” that can be learned quickly and in various contexts. But more generally, skills like this are never learned in the abstract, but as part of a system in which children (and adults) learn that they’re objects to be sold to capitalists and how to make themselves “marketable.” We learn how to adjust ourselves to the needs of the system: how to present and sell ourselves, how to compete with others for jobs and advancement, how to work in hierarchical organizations, how to keep learning the skills capitalists seem to need in that moment, how to be adaptable and flexible,… We learn that we have to submit to the system to get employment to be able to live, and that ultimately we’re disposable. And we learn to consume. The US educational system has largely become a feeder program for capitalism, and none of this is about fulfilling our real needs. That said, it’s certainly possible for anarchist schools to teach skills like this without teaching the ideology at the same time (and indeed while encouraging children to recognize and question the ideology).
(Furthermore, the argument that children should learn how to write resumes to some extent perpetuates the idea that education is about fulfilling their needs for social advancement. It turns out, though, that this is part of the ideology. The millions of people who are virtual experts in writing resumes and are long-term unemployed or working for inadequate wages are testament to this.)
There is nothing in anarchist education that opposes teaching how governments work, both in the basic “civics” sense and in the sense of how and in whose material interests they actually work. Quite the contrary: anarchists and socialists have been among the most astute analysts of governments and economic systems and have been extremely interested in educating people about them. There’s a difference between teaching acceptance of and compliance within a social order and educating for a critical, evidence-based approach to it.
While no one is immune from falling into indoctrination mode, that hasn’t been the belief at the heart of the anarchist educational philosophy. It’s understood to be in keeping with kids’ needs to understand their social world and to participate meaningfully in making it. (I suppose you could see teaching children how to think critically and be self-determining as a form of indoctrination, but only if you think all education by its nature is inherently coercive.)
It’s no such thing. You’ve somehow misunderstood what I’m saying to the extent that you’re reading it as its opposite. Arguing that education should be based on people’s real needs is precisely the opposite of arguing that it should be a cloning process for any social project. If you read, for example, Kropotkin or Ferrer about anarchist educational principles, you’ll find that they reject indoctrination in all forms- religious, political, and economic, and that includes capitalist (you seem to think that if the “greater society” is capitalist it doesn’t indoctrinate).
Ophelia:
This isn’t really responding to my argument, though. It makes several extraneous assumptions: that I’m positing a need for freedom from society or an understanding of needs that is anti- or asocial. I’m not arguing in any way that social-cultural life is inherently coercive or contrary to human needs. On the contrary, I (and Fromm and others I cite) believe that we can and do fulfill our needs in a social context.
The opposition “human needs vs. living in human cultures” doesn’t really make sense. We’re a social species that has evolved in a cultural context, and all of our needs have developed in this context. It’s not reasonable to suggest that we have fundamental needs that are fundamentally contrary to cultural life itself, and that isn’t what I’m suggesting. Living in cultures as such doesn’t mean giving up our needs, but we can critically evaluate cultures on the basis of those needs.
The problem is with assuming that social systems are equal in terms of providing the conditions in which we can fulfill our needs. I’m sure you’d recognize that children shouldn’t be taught to adjust or give way to a Taliban regime or a fascist regime just because that’s the society in which they were born, or that an education based on perpetuating such systems is conducive to the fulfillment of human needs. No society is simply “neutral” in this sense – the basis for judging them and their institutions should be how well they allow for and encourage the fulfillment of human (and other species’) needs.
While I believe that any coincidence between real human needs and the needs of global capitalism is wholly accidental, it’s true that when it comes to actual practice the matter is more complicated. In a fundamentally antihuman system, can institutions meant to help people live (education, psychology, etc.) really help fulfill human needs, or are they necessarily too corrupted by the system to do anything other than manipulate people on its behalf, consciously or otherwise? How can they come to serve human needs while still helping people to live in the present? It happens that I’m writing a post about this right now – specifically about my criticisms of Theodor Adorno, who did argue something similar to how you’re reading my statements – so I’ll link to that when I’ve posted it.
The thing is, it’s all too easy to shift from talking about teaching basic skills or helping people to survive and be “happy” in their lives to taking a systemic perspective that assumes or ignores people’s needs. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of assuming that anything that opposes (or, better, appears to oppose) an antihuman system is conducive to the fulfillment of needs. That’s why I believe we should always keep real human needs at the forefront – as the only perspective from which we can criticize existing systems and create better ones.
This seems a little confused, conflating people’s needs with systemic needs, but I don’t necessarily agree that human needs compete with each other.
One of my first posts about Erich Fromm (it deals primarily with psychiatry and not education, but the principle is the same) covers the same ground as my comments here:
Amy Clare @41 – I agree that the girls’ education would suffer, but also the boys- they’re sabotaging their own lessons through their behaviour. From the Ofsted report children with their background achieve noticeably lower results in their tests, but no breakdown of boys v. girls was given. I’m not sure that stereotype threat would affect the girls disproportionally as the stereotype of British Asians is not that they are unintelligent. I may have misunderstood this concept, though. I’m with you for the rest of the post, and Maureen @40.
Pen @43 – It’s a good point about the variation in Muslim Britain. I’m sure those differences do exist, not least because of varying countries of origin. I also wonder (tangentially) if there has been retrenchment into “Islamic” identity post 9/11. I’ve noticed various blogs round here highlight that the only voice we get from this community is a self-appointed group of representatives who we then assume speak for the whole.
I was a bit reluctant to post all this because of the difficulty of talking about it without just increasing the level of misunderstanding. It’s all very “outside looking in” and I often feel like I might be trampling all over peoples’ complicated life experiences in the service of making a point. I trust you will all point out where I’ve been a fool.
SC@45 “all-important transcultural and transhistorical needs” I don’t understand what these might be beyond really basic things like food and companionship but the particular nature of both changes across cultures. I am sure I’m missing something here.