Dhea, a 26-year-old private employee and a Catholic, knows too well how this feels. She was only 15 when she attended a public high school in Blitar, East Java. While there, she was a victim of intolerance, ironically perpetrated by the very institution that was supposed to protect her from it, and all the while her teachers taught her about the importance of religious tolerance in the classroom.

It all began when her friend, Bejo (not his real name), showed an interest in Christianity and then later decided to renounce his Muslim faith. Things went downhill for him and other Christian students at the school from there.

Bejo was treated diff erently by the other Muslim students after he converted to Christianity, said Dhea, and that wasn’t even the worst part.

She said the school was apparently so perturbed by Bejo’s conversion and decided to ban communal prayer for Christian students as well as Christmas and Easter celebrations.

“Bejo was often mocked when he put some money into the charity box that was set out every Friday.

The [Islamic studies teacher] also particularly refused to receive any cash charity from Bejo [after he converted],” she recounted.

Dhea was no stranger to religious discrimination, either. “When I was in junior high school, my school did not provide a permanent [Catholic studies] teacher. We Catholic students mostly spent the religious studies class by reading books in the library on our own,” she said.

The issue of religious discrimination in Indonesia’s education system is back in the spotlight after a public school in Padang, West Sumatra, made headlines when it imposed a requirement that all female students wear a hijab, regardless of their faith.

The controversy has drawn the ire of public officials, led by Education Minister Nadiem Makarim condemning the school’s hijab requirement. He later issued a joint ministerial regulation banning schools from implementing rules that either enforced or banned certain religious attire among their students.

But religious discrimination is about more than just a student’s choice of dress.

Along with the rise of Islamic conservatism in Indonesia, which has led to a mushrooming trend of religious symbols in public spaces and public demonstrations of religious piety, religious minority students are now confronted with various forms of discrimination.

For instance, most public schools still do not comply with a 2003 education ministerial regulation mandating that students must be provided with religion classes taught by teachers of the same faith to ensure that schools fulfill the rights of religious minority students.

The situation worsened when public schools began to formalize certain faith-based rules that alienated students of minority religions.

The kerohanian Islam (Islamic spirituality) extracurricular activity for Muslim students, more commonly known as “Rohis”, has also been raised in public discourse for spreading views perceived as intolerant.

A 2019 survey by the Wahid Foundation, a humanitarian and educational organization that promotes tolerance and multicultralism, found that 64.8 percent of 895 Rohis students from 621 high schools believed that Muslims were forbidden from electing non-Muslim leaders.

In addition, 89.2 percent of the survey’s student respondents said they agreed with imposing a mandatory hijab dress code at public schools. And 67.5 percent of respondents were strongly opposed to the idea of exchanging religious greetings to people of a diff erent faith.

A separate study in 2018 by the Center for the Study of Islam and Society at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (PPIM UIN) that surveyed 2,237 teachers from 34 provinces found that 57 percent of the respondents held views that were prejudiced against people of a different faith.

Incidents of religious intolerance at Indonesian schools are not new.

In 2016, Zulfa Nur Rohman, an adherent of the Hayu Ningrat traditional Javanese faith, failed the 11th grade because he refused to take the mandatory Islamic studies class at the vocational school he attended in Semarang, Central Java.

In 2018, two junior high schools – SMP 4 junior high school in Tangerang, Banten, and SMP 137 junior high school in Jakarta – imposed a mandatory dress code for female Muslim students to wear a hijab on Thursdays and Fridays.

And most recently in November 2020, Evan Clementine, a Christian student at SMAN 6 senior high school in Depok, West Java, alleged that he was robbed of his election victory as the student council president because of his religion.

SMAN 6 principal Abdul Fatah denied the allegation, however, saying that a revote was called because of a technical issue with the electronic voting machine.

“I can assure you that it’s not [because of religion],” Abdul said, as quoted by kompas.com.

While the rise of religious conservatism is seen to have a large influence on the adoption of intolerant policies at schools, academics point to a systemic problem in the nation’s education system as the root cause.

“This is a systemic implication of the government’s policy of [mainstreaming] political Islam,” said Lailatul Fitriyah, a Ph.D candidate who specializes in comparative Christian and Islamic feminist theologies at the University of Notre Dame, a private Catholic university in the United States.

Alamsyah M. Djafar, a program manager at the Wahid Foundation who advocates for religious minority rights, suggested that the formalization of faith-based practices at schools stemmed from a provision in the National Education Law stating that one objective of national education was to create students who were “beriman dan bertaqwa” (faithful and pious).

While this provision appeared to be neutral, it could become problematic if it was interpreted based on the dominant religious view of a school administration, he said.

“[This manner of interpretation] would not be necessarily faithful and pious in the more general understanding that exists in every religion, that one must not corrupt and must do good,” he said.

Alamsyah points to the government’s concept of civic nationalism that emphasizes the role of religion as the cause of systemic religious discrimination in Indonesian education.

“To become a good nation, religion is thus seen as important. As a consequence, religion is translated into the social domain, including education, through formal regulations,” he said.

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