Muslim Prayer Makes A Poor Homework Assignment

It's not very good judgement for a teacher to include praying to Allah as part of their lesson plan:

An education authority is investigating claims that two school pupils were punished for refusing to kneel down and pray to Allah during a religious education lesson.

Parents complained after the boys, Year 7 pupils at Alsager High School in Cheshire, were given detention for being "disrespectful" to the prophet, the Congleton Chronicle reported.

Parent Sharon Luinen told the paper: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far.

"I understand that they have to learn about other religions, I can live with that, but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn't join in Muslim prayer. Making them pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful."

The school is believed to have received complaints from five sets of parents since the alleged incident on Tuesday.

It doesn't say if the teacher is Muslim, but irregardless, it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. Not only is forced prayer illegal, but if there is just one religiously conservative non-Muslim student in the class, the teacher is almost asking to get fired.

Even if the teacher only wanted the students to better understand Islam, it's still a dumb thing to do. Obviously, you can teach kids about the religion without actually making them pray to Allah. And it also seems unfair to only practice one religion's rituals. For consistencies sake, they should also be forced to do Catholic confession, recognize the Jewish Shabbat, and do countless other religious rituals. But this would be a terrible idea that would offend everybody and waste valuable class time, which fortunately most educators understand.