muslim boys discrimination 'upturned'

Religion aside, what is the issue of a beard?


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Presentability of the kids.

Presentability of the kids.

Will the non-muslim kids also be allowed beards?

Will the non-muslim kids also be allowed beards?

When a non Muslim turns up at the school with a beard and he is allowed to stay, then will I be happy.

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What's the need for pathetic games? Muslim, non Muslim are labels that separate people, why are you perpetuating it?

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What's the need for pathetic games? Muslim, non Muslim are labels that separate people, why are you perpetuating it?

Posted from TSR Mobile

Because having one group of kids being subjected to different rules than another set of kids in our education system based on their faith is A) against secularism and against the law and B) A very bad idea for the dynamics of the school, kids are going to pick up on the way certain members of their peer group are treated differently and it will result in them separating into the "those allowed beards" and "those who aren't allowed beards".)

But they're clearly not being subjected to different standards as the EU ruling clearly set out. That ruling isn't just enacted for one subset of the population. It seems as if the people who harp on about Muslims being subjected to different rules clearly don't know what the original rules are. Besides, since when were beards a "bad dynamic" for a school

The original issue was Muslims being excluded because they refused to remove their beards which were at odds with the schools policy on appearance, the options avaliable were that the Muslims students remain excluded and find another place to study (as you pointed out EU law rules out this option), that Muslims be given special privillages in regards to the bear wearing which would have the problems i outlined above (will explain more below) or the third most sensible option being making beards acceptable for all students thus taking into consideration the religious beliefs of a certain group while maintaining equality amoung all students.

The point about beards causing problems is due to evolution, humans as a species identify with people similar to ourselves. For instance there was an experiment done on children in kindergarten where they were shown 5 pictures of a cartoon child and in each picture the child had a different skin colour, the kids were then asked to pick the nicest one and the naughty one. The cartoon child was completely the same in every picture apart from skin colour. They asked a bunch of white kids to pick and every one picked the blackest kid as being the naughty one and the whitest kid as being the nice one.

Obviously the Americans were up in arms accusing the government, education boards, television and even Sesame street at one point of making their kids racist. The reality was that those results showed the children were actually normal. The experiment was first devised in 1940 by a husband and wife duo called Kevin and Mimi Clark, they set out to prove institutionalized racism in the American school system by using a similar method which they called the "child race doll test" as you can imagine it was the same test done with dolls rather than a cartoon. The difference between those experiments was that the dolls were shown to black kids and asked the same question nearly all of them picked the white kid as nicest and the black kid as naughty.

This highlights a problem, kids are meant to think people the most similar to them are nice because that's what humans evolved to do, black kids picking white dolls showed a pretty big problem. Now the beard issues would arise from a similar psychological basis, the reason we have uniforms is to stop the kids who don't have money or dress sense from being marked as "different", having one group of kids who can have beards and another who can't have beards will create the same kind of issue.

These kinds of experiments have been done time and time again at one point 10 students were picked out of a high school year which had around 50 students, those 10 were given purple ribbons to wear around their right arm. By the end of the two weeks it was observed that the kids with purple ribbons were in their own group, having lunch together and spending breaks together. It sounds bananas especially considering high school students are old enough to "know better" however the truth is simple things which create "us and them" mentalities can quickly result in the exclusion of a certain group of people based on the most mundane things in this case that thing is beards. Allowing everyone to have beards would somewhat lessen that problem as it changes it from a special privilege to a choice.