Friday, March 09, 2018
Jewish school removed 'homosexual' mentions from GCSE textbook
A state-funded Orthodox Jewish girls' school in north London has admitted censoring sections of GCSE textbooks to remove mentions of homosexuals and examples of women socialising with men, saying it did so to protect girls from sexualisation.
Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls' school in Stamford Hill, which serves the strictly Orthodox Haredi community, covered text and images including Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers.
Words and photos were redacted in a book called Understanding the Modern World, one of the exam board AQA's GCSE history resources.
The school removed references to homosexuals from a section on the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan race. Elsewhere, a number of images of women were censored to hide their chests, shoulders and arms, and legs above the knee.
In a section on the position of women in modern American society, references to women smoking, drinking and driving with men were redacted, as was the sentence: "They kissed in public."
The textbooks were passed on to Humanists UK by concerned members of the community.
Jay Harman, the charity's education campaigns manager, described the redactions as "shocking", saying they show an approach to education and a school ethos that is "very worrying".
A spokesman for Yesodey Hatorah said it was "old news" and it was well known that the school redacted textbooks. "This policy has nothing to do homophobia or misogyny, but is to protect our girls from sexualisation in line with our parents' wishes and religious beliefs," he said.
Ofsted has promised to take a tougher line on faith schools and illegal schools over concerns that children are not receiving a balanced and modern education.
Harman said: "In the past, Ofsted has said schools that take this approach, if they are ignoring different sexual orientations and the beliefs of groups … [then they] are not meeting their obligation under the Equality Act … You cannot teach kids to be tolerant to people who are different if you are ignorant of those people."
Similar complaints were made against Yesodey Hatorah in 2013, when the exam board OCR found 52 papers in two GCSE science exams had questions on evolution obscured, meaning they could not be answered.
An OCR spokesman said: "Ensuring the integrity of the exam system is of paramount importance to OCR and we will always take all the steps necessary to protect it."
At the time, the exam board held discussions with the school to ensure the episode was not repeated. It also raised concerns with the Department for Education and Ofsted, as well as the Joint Council for Qualifications.
An Ofsted spokesperson said all schools had a duty to actively promote fundamental British values, including "mutual respect and tolerance of those who hold values different from their own".
"We will not hesitate to act where we have concerns that schools are failing to uphold these values," they said. "Inspectors have recently visited the school and will publish their findings in due course."
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