There is a sense that the British Times has taken a leaf out of the Gray Lady’s book
Another week, another Times attack on the chassidic education system — except that this time around, it’s not the NYT, but the Times of London, and the targets of the front-page exposé aren’t in Brooklyn but within miles of Buckingham Palace.
“Thousands of British boys as old as 16 can barely read and write English, with some being routinely beaten in unsafe schools,” the influential broadsheet reported last week, “because the government allows a strict religious group to deny them an adequate education.”
Among the group in question — “Hasidic Jews” — girls are allowed to study secular subjects, but young boys “receive a maximum of two hours of secular lessons each day, before vanishing en masse from school rolls at age 13 to enter unregistered religious schools where no English is spoken.”
At fault, explained Andrew Norfolk, the paper’s chief investigative reporter, is a loophole that allows full-time educational institutions to operate without adhering to a basic curriculum under the fiction that the children are being homeschooled.
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