Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

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   The defence of a Christian view never seems to be settled by debate: exchange of facts, reference to historical events.…

3. 

   But …… Rwanda is a safe place: Parliament says so.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/8/contentsSafety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 S 2 Safety…

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   Religion can survive only on the most unquestionable assumptions. The statements made on Sundays on the BBC as if they…

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   Yes, if I’ve got anything remotely like a phobia, as an ex-fundy, its bibles, churches, tracts etc. I like to…

FOR years expert have warned against the dangers of home-schooling, a mainly unregulated practice that allows parents to indoctrinate their children under the guise of “education”.

But in the wake of home-schooled Sara Sharif’s widely reported murder trial, which resulted in today (Tuesday) in lengthy jail sentences for her father, Urfan Sharif, her step-mother Beinash Batool and her uncle, Faisal Malik, the UK government has vowed tighten up rules regarding the practice.

It’s a disgrace that it took the unnbelievably brutal treatment of Sara —which ultimately led to the ten-year-old’s death last August — for this action to be announced by Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary.

Under Phillipson’s proposed legislation, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, local councils will be given the power to intervene and demand school attendance if they deem a child’s home environment unsuitable or unsafe.

It will also remove the automatic right for parents to home-school their child if their child is subject to a protection investigation or is under a protection plan — meaning they are suspected of being at risk of significant harm.

Image via Surrey Police

In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Cavanagh said that Sara, above, had suffered more than 70 fresh injuries and 25 fractures at the time of her death.

This poor child was battered with great force, again and again.

He said her injuries:

Included a fractured collar bone, two fractured shoulder blades, fractured ribs, a fractured humerus, eleven separate fractures to her spinal column, and fractures to bones in both of her hands … The degree of cruelty involved is almost inconceivable. It is no exaggeration to describe the campaign of abuse against Sara as torture.

Image via Surrey Police

Urfan Sharif, left, will serve at least 40 years in prison and Beinash Batool a minimum of 33 years. Sara’s uncle, Faisal Malik, was also sentenced to a minimum of 16 years after being found guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child.

The judge added:

This case brings into sharp relief the dangers of unsupervised home-schooling of vulnerable children. When they felt they needed to, you, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool, were able to hide the abuse that Sara was suffering by the simple expedient of announcing that she was to be home-schooled. Of course, there are many cases in which parents take their children out of school for periods of home-schooling for good reasons and with the best of intentions, but this case starkly illustrates the dangers.

Home-schooling in the US is driven by a powerful lobby

In 2020 The Harvard Gazette interviewed Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet who called for a radical transformation in home-schooling.

She said:

Behind the rapid growth of the home-schooling movement is the growth in the conservative evangelical movement. Conservative Christians wanted the chance to bring their children up with their values and belief systems and saw home-schooling as a way to escape from the secular education in public schools. They had fought the battle with public school systems to have their children exempted from exposure to alternative values in the schools and lost. When they started withdrawing their children for home-schooling, this propelled expansion of the homeschooling movement.

She added that one particular harmful aspect of home-schooling was:

The danger of child maltreatment, and we have evidence that there is a strong connection between homeschooling and maltreatment … Other dangers are that children are simply not learning basic academic skills or learning about the most basic democratic values of our society or getting the kind of exposure to alternative views that enables them to exercise meaningful choice about their future lives.

Bartholet went on to say:

Many home-schooling parents are extreme ideologues, committed to raising their children within their belief systems isolated from any societal influence. Some believe that black people are inferior to white people and others that women should be subject to men and not educated for careers but instead raised to serve their fathers first and then their husbands. The danger is both to these children and to society. The children may not have the chance to choose for themselves whether to exit these ideological communities; society may not have the chance to teach them values important to the larger community, such as tolerance of other people’s views and values.

Asked why has the home-schooling lobby had become so strong, Bartolet explained:

The home-schooling lobby may be even more powerful than the gun lobby today, because at least with the gun lobby we see a lot of pushback. When it comes to homeschooling, the victims are all children so it’s harder to mount a political movement. Initially, homeschooling was a really interesting mix of left and right thinking — left-progressive views that children’s natural creativity was being ruined in schools and right-wing religious views. Over the past decades, right-wing Christian conservatives became the dominant group in terms of numbers, and they completely took over in terms of political activism. Their power has to do with their ideological fervor, their tactics, and the absence of any significant organized opposition. Many academics and the biggest teachers’ unions in the country have found homeschooling deeply problematic. Homeschooling graduates have formed organizations documenting some of the maltreatment and other problems their members suffered and calling for regulatory reform.

Although it appears the US has the biggest problem as regards home-schooling, the trend has gained a significant foothold in other countries, but is banned in countries such as Germany, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece and Hungary. In April, 2019, Cuban pastor Ramón Rigal and his wife Adya were sentenced to jail terms of 2.5 and 1.5 years of jail, respectively, for home-schooling their two children: Ruth, 13, and Joel, 9.

However, among outfits that advocate home-schooling there is an organisation called Christian Education Europe, which states:

God has entrusted us with the responsibility of transferring the principles that He has taught us to the hearts and minds of the  most precious gifts He has given us. He knows what is best for your children, and providing them with an education based on His Word gives them all the tools they need to make good decisions for the rest of their lives.

And a home-schooling site in the UK, EdPlace says with pride:

Deciding to start home-schooling your child can be one of the most rewarding decisions you’ll ever make. So much so that, according to the BBC, the number of children being home schooled in the UK had risen by 40% in the three years prior to 2018! UK parents enjoy a huge amount of freedom when it comes to home-schooling their children. As a parent in the UK you have every right to educate your child at home, either full or part time. You don’t even need permission to home-school …

And that is precisely the problem that should have been addressed long before the death of Sara Sharif.

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