{"id":10534,"date":"2011-10-08T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/10\/08\/controversy-over-religion-in-toronto-school\/"},"modified":"2011-10-08T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-08T12:00:00","slug":"controversy-over-religion-in-toronto-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/10\/08\/controversy-over-religion-in-toronto-school\/","title":{"rendered":"Controversy Over Religion In Toronto School"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.stratfordbeaconherald.com\/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3304073\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>TORONTO, CANADA, September 19, 2001 (The Beacon Herald): A demonstration outside Toronto&#8217;s public-school board headquarters turned into an ugly, bitter confrontation over the Toronto District School Board&#8217;s controversial policy to allow prayer in the city&#8217;s publicly funded, secular school system.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are here because religion has no place in our schools,&#8221; said Ron Banerjee, of Canadian Hindu Advocacy. Allowing &#8220;fundamentalist teachings&#8221; in school &#8220;effectively amounts to oppressing the children, brainwashing of the children,&#8221; he asserts.<\/p>\n<p>About three metres away, on the other side of the police line, supporters of the policy, many of them young students, tried to shout down prayer opponents.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I am here to support the board for letting us pray in school,&#8221; said Aayman Karin, 13, one of about 100 Muslim students who pray on certain Fridays in the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School, on Overlea Blvd.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Everyone has the right to practice their religion,&#8221; Karin said, adding students feel more comfortable praying in school with their classmates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source TORONTO, CANADA, September 19, 2001 (The Beacon Herald): A demonstration outside Toronto&#8217;s public-school board headquarters turned into an ugly,,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}