Lahore; January 25, 2022: The daily Dawn published the following noteworthy news by its Staff Reporter in Lahore:
Govt bent upon imposing extreme religiosity on students
Lahore: On the International Day of Education the civil society stakeholders in education reforms showed concerns about the recent measures introduced in school education in Punjab, terming it loaded with religious content and nomenclature, changing the very character of school education in the province.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) and Working Group for Inclusive Education (WGIE) released an update on Monday about the education policy confusions in the province.
According to the stakeholders, instead of modernizing education and introducing creative and inquisitive learning, the government had relied on religion-centric reforms. The steps made public education next to seminary education, which would be a colossal loss to an already challenged education sector.
Comment: Extreme religiosity involves giving high priority and unprecedented gravity to only one aspect of the belief in the End of Prophethood and thereby emphasizing the sectarian difference between Ahmadis and other Muslims. Relevant to this is the Punjab Government’s instruction to schools that ‘Students should be imparted repeated lessons on End of Prophethood, in the light of Quran and Hadith during the Islamiat and Arabic periods’ as per CEO DEA Sialkot Circular dated August 17, 2021. In our opinion, this Directive practically promotes sectarianism and religious hatred.
