about yasmeen
A teacher who walked away.
A mother who never looked back.
I was a primary school teacher who broke the rules because the rules were breaking children.
Before that, I studied psychology because I wanted to understand human nature. What makes us who we are. What makes us the same, and what makes us different. That curiosity has never left me.
I arrived in Australia as a refugee in the year 2000, at fifteen years old. Eight years later I had a degree, a career, and ambitions to make the world a better place. The education system had carried me here, or so I believed. I was living proof that education was the great equaliser, and I was certain it could do the same for everyone.
That was about to change.
The First Crack · 2010
Behavioural science, applied
In 2010 I watched a short documentary that showed me something I could not dismiss: through television, ideas and values were being planted in people’s minds without their awareness. I had never considered that many of my own ideas had been shaped by the media and programs I was consuming. The evidence was not conspiratorial. It was behavioural science, applied.
That evening I wanted to throw it out. My husband convinced me to unplug it instead and give it to someone who could use it. I have not owned a television since.
Some months later, I watched Consuming Kids and learned that corporations were hiring child psychologists, not to protect children, but to study them. To identify the precise emotional triggers that would turn a childhood dream into a brand loyalty. I was not yet a mother, but I made a vow: no child of mine would be a captive market.
The Blasphemous Definition
What the government has determined to be important
As a new teacher, I was sent to a professional development seminar. The first activity of the day was to define the term “curriculum.” Teachers offered their idealistic answers: essentials for lifelong learning, preparation for the future, the foundations of a good life.
Then the instructor gave the real definition.
“Curriculum is what the government has determined to be important for your child to learn.“
I scanned the room to see if anyone else was as surprised as I was. No one looked up.
The instructor’s definition conjured an image I could not shake: an old man with a long white beard, wagging his finger from the clouds, telling me what to teach my child. I immediately protested this image because as a Muslim I want to raise Muslim children with souls oriented toward God, toward truth, toward virtue and character. How dare this man choose what my child should know. But the people around me had accepted this intrusive definition without a fight.
I stayed until the end of the day. Physically. Mentally, I had already checked out.
The Teacher Who Broke the Rules
The only thing a person who loves children could do
And yet I still showed up. My first full year teaching position was second grade. I arrived full of idealism and left with something harder and more useful: clarity.
I was handed a curriculum decided in boardrooms far from children. I was instructed to deliver an American reading program to Australian kids. They would start yawning the moment I opened the book.
So I stopped opening the book.
I spent my weekends sourcing real storybooks for read-alouds, teaching spelling through narratives, collecting physical materials so children could measure and see mathematical concepts rather than fill in worksheets about them. For science, I brought bowls of water and objects to the classroom so they could actually test theories. Sink or float, but with their own hands, their own eyes, their own conclusions. I poured enormous energy into reigniting what the program had been steadily extinguishing: the children’s innate love of learning.
I never told my supervisor. By the policy I had been handed, I was doing wrong. I was not doing wrong. I was doing the only thing a person who loves children could do in that room.
It was clear this system went against principles I didn’t even know I had. This was not education, but I didn’t yet have words for what it was. This had to be my first and last institutional position.
The Pattern
The same system, wearing different uniforms
By then I had seen the same thing in three separate places. Corporations studied children to sell to them. Governments decided what children should know. Schools delivered programs without any apparent concern for what they were doing to the children in front of them. Each one operated on the same assumption: that people, especially children, were things to be managed.
These were not separate problems. They were the same system, wearing different uniforms. The moment I saw that, I could not unsee it. I knew I was not going to be a part of it. I did not yet know what was on the other side.
I had not gone looking for any of this. A documentary here, a seminar there, a classroom that showed me what policy looked like when it reached a child. Each one arrived without my asking. All I did was refuse to look away.
It took me years to understand why I could see what others in the same room could not. I came from a war-torn country. I had attended perhaps one year of schooling before arriving in Australia at fifteen. The system never had enough time to do its work on me. My curiosity remained intact.
A Mother’s Vow · 2012
No institution would have my children
I was pregnant with my first child. I knew the school system was broken. I didn’t yet know the full extent of it, but I knew enough. And I knew one more thing: I was not going to spend my days trying to undo the damage of an impossible system on other people’s children while someone else raised mine.
No institution would have my children. I made that decision and I have never revisited it.
My oldest is now fourteen. I have five children. None of them have ever sat in an institutional classroom. None of them have been handed someone else’s definition of what is important for them to know.
What Our Days Look Like
The rest bends around life
Most days begin with Quran. The older children review what they have memorised and add something new. From there we do what the preschooler and baby allow us to do in peace: copywork for the youngest school-age child, composition and grammar for the older two, Arabic, mathematics, Japanese (we live in Japan). History, geography, and natural science come through narration. We try to have time outdoors daily.
My oldest crochets, bakes, does origami and calligraphy. The older three are all nature artists and avid readers: they read the way other children watch screens, constantly and by choice. The five-year-old knows every letter sound and refuses all reading instruction. He listens to long stories, asks for books by name, and “reads” the pictures. He is building everything a reader needs. The instructions can wait.
Some people thrive on strict schedules and detailed lesson plans. We are not those people. What stays constant is the Quran, the reading, and the direction we are moving in. The rest bends around life.
What I know now
My pedagogy draws from wherever excellence lives
I am grateful I became a primary school teacher and studied psychology. Without both, I would never have seen what I saw.
I have been homeschooling since 2016. I have gone down many rabbit holes and experimented with many approaches. I started with Montessori. It was not for us. I read widely on classical education. Then in 2017 I discovered Charlotte Mason and something clicked. The religious foundation resonated deeply. All I had to do was swap the Biblical teachings for Quranic ones.
But I am not a Charlotte Mason purist. My pedagogy draws from wherever excellence lives. John Taylor Gatto’s forensic dismantling of institutional schooling, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s documentation of deliberate academic decline, cognitive science, and child development research have all shaped how we do education in our home.
Islam encourages us to seek beneficial knowledge wherever it exists. Good ideas belong to everyone willing to use them well.
What I offer
Children have souls worth nourishing, not just brains worth filling
My faith shapes everything I do. Most content on this site exists in two versions: one universal, one with an Islamic layer. The universal content carries no religious framing. It stands on its own. The Islamic versions draw on Quran and authentic hadith for parents who want that foundation. You choose which you use.
What remains the same across all of it is this: I want to serve parents who believe children have souls worth nourishing and protecting, not just brains worth filling.
The goal of true education is a human being oriented toward truth, capable of critical and independent thought, and grounded in principles that cannot be taken from them. Schooling does not offer any of the above.
What I Want to Leave Behind
Knowledge that outlives the one who carried it
Islam encourages us to seek beneficial knowledge. It also commands us to pass it on.
What remains the same across all of it is this: I want to serve parents who believe children have souls worth nourishing and protecting, not just brains worth filling.
The goal of true education is a human being oriented toward truth, capable of critical and independent thought, and grounded in principles that cannot be taken from them. Schooling does not offer any of the above.
The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said: “When a man dies, his deeds come to an end except for three things: ceaseless charity, knowledge which is beneficial, or a virtuous descendant who prays for him.“
Sahih Muslim
Beneficial knowledge left behind. That is what I want this to be. As someone who believes in the hereafter, I know that what I share here does not end with me. God willing, it compounds long after I am gone. That is not a metaphor. It is the reason I write.
Who This Is For
This is not a space for everyone
I write for parents who believe that childhood is sacred. Who feel, before they can name it, that something is being done to their child that should not be done. Who understand that who does the teaching matters as much as what is taught, and that what a child learns to see and value in their earliest years will shape everything that follows.
If you have read this far, you already know something is wrong. That feeling is not paranoia. It is clarity arriving. You are in the right place.
Begin Your Journey