Government ready to deploy 100,000 religious teacher

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.