Religious Schools Thrive in Indonesia

As fast and modern life creeps into the Indonesian homes, busy parents are resorting to religious schools to guarantee a good religious upbringing for their children, the Jakarta Post reported on Friday, November 18.
“I know they are in good hands and I believe this school can give them a solid foundation for their lives based on Islamic values,” Trisnawieta Eviany, a 37-year-old mother who lives in Kelapa Dua, Depok, said.
Sending her children to Nurul Fikri Islamic School, Eviany said she wanted to guarantee a good religious education for them.
Nurul Fikri is one of 1,700 Islamic schools in Greater Jakarta.
Trisnawieta said that learning Islamic values early on in their lives could help shape her two sons to become better people.
She added that her family did not have enough religious knowledge to teach her children.
“I simply want them to behave, and one of the ways to do that is through religion,” she told the Post, adding that daily Qur’an recitals were part of the school’s curriculum.
“And I want to introduce religion to them as early as possible because it takes a very long time for someone to get used to religion and make it a main reference.”
Not only Indonesia Muslims.
Kristina Pujaningrum, whose daughter is a sixth-grader at a Catholic school in Bekasi, West Java, said that religious school was probably the only place where lessons on religion were taught well.
“It might be easier to make your children smarter in math and science at regular schools, but I think it’s harder to instill religious values amid all the modernity,” she said.
At the school, Kristina said that her daughter gets two to three hours of religious studies a day. Moreover, her daughter attends daily morning prayer, daily mass prayer and Sunday services.
“So that’s why I decided to enroll her in a religious school,” added Kristina.

Religious Values

For Indonesian mothers, these educational institutions guaranteed that the children would acquire tolerant religious values from early age that would help them to become better people.
“The school intensively communicates with the parents. They tell us about the materials taught in class,” Trisnawieta told the Jakarta Post.
Such interaction guaranteed their children would not turn into extremists.
“So I’m pretty sure that the school doesn’t have any intention to turn their students into extremists,” she added.
Kristina, the Christian mother, agrees.
“I would not in any way bar her from making friends with kids from other faiths,” she told the Post.
Rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Komaruddin Hidayat said that teachers in religious schools held the key to creating inclusive students.
“With good teachers, students can become tolerant,” he said.
“On the contrary, if teachers are too exclusive, they will teach them to be narrow-minded students.”
Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation with a population of 235 million, around 85 percent of them Muslims.
Christians account for about 10 percent of Indonesia’s 226 million people.
The remaining percent is divided between Hindu, Buddhist and other minorities.

Source: OnIslam & Newspapers