The following is an extract from an article by the Rajya Sabha member and daughter of the CM, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi. She raises an important point about the management of schools placing restrictions on the students to practice their religious beliefs. It is significant that someone from the Dravidian Political movement is raising this question too. I think this is worth discussing.
Recently, someone had similarly mentioned about Roman Catholic educations institutions across the country shutting down to protest against the Orissa violence against Christians. In Chennai many educational institutions had sent their students on a rainy day to stand as a 'human chain' to protest against the violence on Tamils in Sri Lanka. The kind of religious, idealogical and other sectarian ideas of the mangement being brought to bear upon the students are rather high. Do the students have a choice?
Today (December 9) is Bakrid, an important festival for Muslims. And this country has a reasonably large population of Muslims who celebrate that festival. There is a sizeable number of educational institutions run privately that decide to work on this day — institutions whose founders claim to subscribe to other religious beliefs. A few days ago, in a particular school, when the teacher announced a project work for this day, a Muslim student expressed his inability to attend school on that day. She answers him, in a matter-of-fact manner: “Students who do not come to school on that day can consider themselves as failed.”
This would look like a minor incident. But ask the child. I can imagine the anger, the fear, the sense of being excluded, that moment would have created in the mind of the child. When the teacher spoke to him thus, did he feel he was queer? That he was different from the 50-odd students in the class? Will he search for answers when he gets out of school? I can cite many such examples of exclusion and the communal politics that leads to a few more — or fewer — red letters in a school calendar. These attitudes are reflected in many layers and levels.
This is not to blame any particular group or to say the others are all blameless. The others might have different versions of such stories to share. There are many such institutions that play similar games in the name of religion and end up sowing the seeds of hatred and divisiveness in the minds of children. The world today would like to claim that education, the evolution of civilisation, and the experience of wars has brought humanity to understand that people are more important — than even the state. But what we think will lead our next generation to enlightenment, tolerance and peace today, our educational institutions, are turning into production houses of intolerance and hatred. Schools discriminate in terms of the income of parents, on the lines of gender, and sometimes even on the lines of caste, religion and language. However ridiculous and unreal — bordering on the surreal, it may sound — often even on the lines of eating habits.
Some schools, under the excuse of religious sentiments or spiritual beliefs, do not allow children to bring or eat the food of their choice inside the school premises. These rules are often unwritten but enforced. Staff members routinely reprimand students who fail to abide by the unwritten codes. Emboldened by the act of those in authority, other students ostracise those who do not conform. What happens when these children leave school and face people of different belief systems and habits when they start their own lives? Where does it leave them in terms of tolerance if we, under the pretext of protecting them or being sensitive to a particular section, alienate them from experiencing the diversity? If we isolate them from exposure to other cultures or thought processes or faiths — as is being done in many places now — we have to prepare to reap the whirlwind.
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