Collateral damage in the smashed crucible of liberalism
by Melanie Phillips:
Is Britain’s Jewish community becoming collateral damage in the government’s flailing attempt to combat Islamist extremism?
Yesodey Hatorah is a Charedi girls’ school in Stamford Hill with excellent academic results. Recently, it was inspected by Ofsted. According to the school, the inspectors had one thing on their minds: the school’s approach to sex education on which they questioned pupils.
But Yesodey Hatorah doesn’t have sex education because this is contrary to the Charedi value of extreme modesty.
Ofsted says its inspectors “know how to hold these conversations in a sensitive and age-appropriate way”. However, on the Unherd website the columnist and priest Giles Fraser who visited the school wrote that pupils were very upset.
“This felt like an attack,” one said, “because under no circumstances did we want to discuss things that we were brought up our entire lives not to discuss.” One parent wrote of Ofsted’s attempt to force “an alien discussion with our girls of their private bodies and of intimate relationships with strangers” which “serves to undermine our beliefs in every possible way.”
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