The UK government has recently proposed legislation that would force all homeschooled children to register with the government. Around 82,200 children are currently being homeschooled according to estimates.
Religious groups, such as the Orthodox Haredi Jews, have expressed concern that the proposed legislation could lead to further intrusion into private education and possibly impact what is being taught in religious schools, Reuters reports.
A spokesperson for the government stated that the goal of the registry was to ensure children had a “safe and suitable education,” but the word “suitable” has been interpreted by some as having a broad meaning that could potentially insert subjects like sexual education or gender ideology on students of religious schools.
Rabbi Asher Gratt, a former governor at the biggest Haredi school in London, commented on the proposed law saying,
This intrusion by the state not only threatens parental rights and fundamental freedoms but also puts at risk the faith, culture and traditional way of life cherished by the strictly Orthodox Jewish community.
The fears of government interference come after Ofsted, the UK’s education standards office, claimed that the privately-funded Jewish Beis Medrash Elyon high school did not do enough to teach about sexual orientation and gender identity.
The UK government has already faced pushback regarding gender ideology in public schools from members of the Muslim community in Birmingham, who led protests in 2019 at the Anderton Park primary school, which saw Muslim parents protest for weeks outside of the school.
“Do you know how hard it is to explain to a four-year-old why she doesn’t have two daddies?” one of the protesters, a local mother, said at the time and added, “She kept pushing it – ‘I want two daddies’ – questioning me: ‘Why can’t I?’ It was upsetting for me and my child.”
The Birmingham protests later spread across other parts of the UK with letters from Muslims opposing LGBT and gender education being sent to schools in Bradford, Manchester, Bristol, Nottingham, Croydon, and elsewhere.
Amir Ahmed, a protester, told British media that the protests were not against homosexual individuals but against homosexuality being taught to young children.
“You can condition them to accept this as being a normal way of life and it makes the children more promiscuous as they grow older,” he said and added, “Whether they become gay or not, they can still enter into gay relationships. They want to convert you, they want to convert your morality and that’s just wrong.”
The concern of Haredi Orthodox Jews in the UK comes after Hasidic Jews in the United States have come under criticism for education standards that place far more emphasis on Jewish laws and traditions than on secular education.
An article in the New York Times in September of last year claimed that students of the schools were not being properly educated as they tended to fail secular tests in reading and math at their grade levels, performing well behind other private schools.
A similar report was released by the Times earlier this year which claimed that many boys in Yiddish-speaking Hasidic schools in London could not even speak conversational English or read and write in the language.
