Sharifah Munirah Alatas said religious studies will result in children of other races being excluded. As it is, she said, non-Muslim schoolchildren were already the minority in national schools.

“The majority is going one way to learn a specific subject and it is impressionable on young kids. Separation is not good,” said Sharifiah to reporters after a discussion on social movements in Malaysia.

Sharifah, a lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, said schoolchildren should grow together as a group. “They should go through the day together, playing the same games. So, have religious classes after school hours,” she said.

She also suggested that parents be made to attend religious classes with their children as the parents need to “teach their children morality”.

Religion, she said, was a private matter and should be kept out of the school system.

Sharifah said another issue with religious classes is that the country did not have the “right teachers teaching the right Islam”.

She said she did not have confidence in the way Islam was taught in schools.

After changing the government, civil society now stagnant

On a separate matter, Sharifah said that civil society, which played an important role in the changing of the government, had become stagnant.

This, she said, was after the nation had been embroiled in identity politics, while communalism was still “very much alive”.

“Everyone still thinks in terms of their race and religion. This is the mindset we have not moved away from since last year, and I don’t see anything changing in terms of civil society,” she said.

She cautioned that a stagnant civil society could see the nation becoming “yes people”.

“We will all just accept the way things are and we will develop an oppressive leadership which will take advantage of the people and manipulate them,” she said.