I didn't have an actual magazine to read today, but I was able to find an article online at the Time Magazine website; so, I guess that'll do. It was written by a woman named Marguerite Michaels/Bridgeview, and it is all about how Muslim kids are learning to fit in with America, but also not compromise their religious and cultural values as well. It focuses on this Islamic school that lies in one of the U.S. largest Arab communities (near Chicago) tries to prepare it's students to be the best and also tries to prepare them to fit in with Americans and not be seduced into sex and drugs and T.V., which is apparently was American culture is based on.

It also talks about how the Muslim kids feel like outsiders a lot of the time because our cultures are so different. So, this school of theirs tries to just integrate both cultures together in a completely Islamic student body to make the kids feel more comfortable. 95% of their kids go to college, and live normal lives, they just have to cope with different cultural pulls, just like all of the other races that first came over to America had to deal with and are still dealing with. The Islamic people are just having a harder time fitting in right now because of what happened at 9/11. In my point of view, that is really no different than what happened to the Japanese Americans when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, only I think the Japanese had if off a little worse, since they were all put into internment camps. But, I guess I just feel that way because I'm Japanese. They even make a comment about that in the article...asking if all of this discrimination is going to before their children are being put into internment camps.

This Universal School is very much like Oxford (my highschool), with strict dress codes and rules. Their environment seems much stricter because they have to attend religious gatherings during school every week, and girls are not allowed to wear make-up, and the sexes are separated from 7th-11th grade. They are allowed to mix clases again in senior year, but the girls and guys still can't sit together. It seems like everything is targeted towards keeping the kids away from T.V. and sex and the influences of American culture. It was just kind of interesting to see how different some other cultures are, and see how they are integrating with American culture right now, because when my family first came over, they just threw themselves into the culture and considered themselves American. They never really looked back.