Government ready to deploy 100,000 religious teacher

A'an Suryana, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Minister of Religious Affairs Said Agiel Munawar says the government is ready to deploy 30,000 additional teachers in order to anticipate a shortage in the case that the education bill now being deliberated by the House of Representatives (DPR) is passed into law.

Chapter 13 of the education bill requires both state-owned and private schools to provide teachers of religion for every faith represented by their students.

The minister said the government would provide Muslim teachers for non-Muslim schools.

"Their salaries will be taken out of the state budget," Said was quoted by Antara as saying on Wednesday in Surabaya, East Java.

Besides the 30,000 religious teachers, the government was also ready to deploy other 70,000 teachers, who will be recruited from the Ministry of National Education.

Currently, neither Muslim nor non-Muslim schools provide religious teachers for all faiths represented by the student body.

In addition, students are obliged to attend religion classes dealing only with the school's denomination. Therefore, Christian schools require non-Christian students to attend their Christian classes, while Muslim schools require non-Muslim students to attend Islamic classes.

If the bill is passed into law, schools are obliged to provide religious teachings for all denominations, no matter the religious affiliation of the school.

The House is planning to convene a plenary meeting on June 10 to endorse the bill, which has been widely criticized by both moderate Muslim groups and Christians, who argued that the bill was a form of state intervention in religious life and in the otherwise autonomous schools.

Meanwhile, the legislative council of the National Awakening Party (PKB) demanded that Chapter 13 be omitted, on the grounds that it had created a public uproar.

"According to Islamic law (fiqh), any issue that could cause conflict should be omitted for the benefit of all," said deputy secretary of the council Noer Iskandar Al-Barsany.

Iskandar said that the council would recommend the omission at its national meeting, and if it was then concluded that the chapter must be omitted, then the PKB faction in the House must support the stance.

PKB, the fourth biggest party, voices the interests of the Nadhlatul Ulama (NU), the largest Muslim organization in the country with around 40 million members. NU also runs a large number of Islamic schools in rural areas.