There is something I have often wondered about children. How do they learn whom not to like? After all, a child does not come into this world knowing that one person is acceptable and another is not. They don’t know which religion is supposed to be respected more, which community is considered an outsider or why someone else’s name, faith or identity should make them less worthy of friendship.
They learn these things from us. Sometimes through what we say. Sometimes through what we teach. And sometimes through what we don’t say at all. I know this because I grew up on the receiving end of it.
I am an Ahmadi Muslim and from elementary school through high school, college and university, I experienced bullying and exclusion because of my faith in Pakistan. Some of it was direct. Some of it was subtle enough that perhaps the person doing it did not even think of it as cruelty.
There were times when I would say assalamu alaikum and the other person would simply not respond. I remember the feeling more than I remember the individual incidents. It was strange to realise that a greeting of peace could be met with silence because of who I was.
I was not asking anyone to agree with me. I was not asking them to share my beliefs. I was simply greeting the way I had been taught. But somewhere along the way, someone had learned that even that small courtesy did not have to be extended to me.
That is what prejudice does. It makes a person decide something about you before they have ever taken the time to know you. And perhaps that is why I have always believed that the real story of prejudice begins much earlier than the moment it becomes visible.
It begins with a lesson. A child hears that certain people are different. Then that difference is explained. Then it is given a value. And eventually, the child begins to understand that there are people who belong to “us” and people who belong somewhere outside that circle.
We often talk about hatred as though it appears suddenly – in a violent act, a hateful slogan, a mob or some terrible incident that makes the news.
But hatred can have much quieter beginnings. It can begin with a joke that nobody challenges. A textbook that describes one community through stereotypes. A teacher who casually repeats something they themselves were taught. A parent who tells a child to stay away from “those people.” A classroom where one child’s identity is treated as something shameful. And then, one day, that child grows up.
In Pakistan, this is not simply a philosophical question. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom published a report in 2016 titled Teaching Intolerance in Pakistan: Religious Bias in Public School Textbooks. It examined textbooks used in public schools and documented biased and stereotypical portrayals of religious communities, including Ahmadis, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Jews. The report also noted the absence of adequate discussion of the rights and contributions of religious minorities to Pakistan.
An earlier USCIRF–supported study, Connecting the Dots: Education and Religious Discrimination in Pakistan, went beyond textbooks. Researchers reviewed more than 100 textbooks from grades one through 10 and interviewed students and teachers in public schools and madrassas across Pakistan. The study found both examples of tolerance and significant expressions of prejudice toward religious communities, including Ahmadis, Christians and Jews.
These findings matter because a textbook is not just a book. To a child, it is an authority. When something is printed in a schoolbook and taught in a classroom, a child does not necessarily have the experience or confidence to stand back and ask, “Is this really true?” They absorb it. And what a child absorbs about another human being can stay with them for years.
For an Ahmadi child, there is another layer to this. You can grow up knowing that the people being discussed are not some distant group you have never encountered. They are your parents. Your grandparents. Your neighbours. Your friends. They are the people sitting beside you in the classroom.
You know them as human beings. Yet you may discover that somewhere outside your home, they have been reduced to a label. That contradiction is difficult for a child to understand.
It was difficult for me. How can the person I know as kind, funny, generous and ordinary be described to someone else as something fundamentally different? How can a person who has never met me decide that I am someone they should not speak to?
And how does a child make sense of being told, in one place, that they are equal – while experiencing, in another, that they are not?
These questions are not uniquely Pakistani. The forms of prejudice differ from country to country. The histories are different. The communities that have been targeted are different. We should not flatten those differences or pretend that every experience is the same. But the question of what we teach children about people who are different from them belongs to all of us.
That is not a Pakistani story. It is not a Muslim story. It is a human story. Every society has people whose histories have been misunderstood, simplified or pushed to the margins. Every society has inherited prejudices that can be passed quietly from one generation to the next.
The names change. The circumstances change. But the mechanism can be remarkably similar. We tell children a story about another group before they ever meet anyone from that group.
And then we wonder why they are afraid of one another. Or why they don’t trust one another. Or why they grow up believing that discrimination is somehow normal. There is something else that concerns me even more. The child who is taught prejudice is also being deprived of something.
They are being deprived of the opportunity to know people as individuals. They may grow up never discovering that the person they were taught to distrust could have been their friend. They may never hear the other person’s story. They may never discover how much they actually have in common.
That is a loss for both sides. I don’t believe children are naturally hateful. I believe children are remarkably curious. They ask questions adults sometimes wish they wouldn’t. Why does she dress differently? Why does he pray differently? Why does his family celebrate something we don’t? Why does her family speak another language?
A child asks because they don’t know. The answer we give them matters. We can teach them that difference is frightening. Or we can teach them that difference is something to understand. We can teach them that loving your own religion requires you to dislike someone else’s. Or we can teach them that conviction and compassion can exist together. We can teach them to inherit our suspicions. Or we can teach them to question them.
That last part is especially important to me. Because I don’t want to write this as though children are doomed to become whatever their environment teaches them. They are not. People change. They grow. They meet someone who challenges what they believe. They read something that makes them uncomfortable. They discover that the person they were told was “different” is not so different after all.
Sometimes, they unlearn. And perhaps that is where education has its greatest responsibility. Education should not merely tell children what to think. It should teach them how to think. How to question a stereotype. How to recognise when a historical account is incomplete. How to distinguish between faith and prejudice. How to disagree without humiliating another person. How to hold firmly to their own beliefs without believing that someone else’s dignity has to be taken away.
UNESCO itself describes education as a critical means of addressing the roots of prejudice and hate, including through efforts to challenge stereotypes and promote more inclusive approaches to teaching. For me, this is not an academic discussion.
I still remember what it felt like to offer a simple greeting and receive nothing in return. I cannot tell you what was in the minds of every person who ignored me. I don’t know what they had been taught at home, what they had heard from others, or what they believed they were defending.
But I do know what it felt like to be the child on the other side of that lesson. And perhaps that is why I cannot stop thinking about the children on both sides. The child who is taught that someone like me is not worthy of a response. And the child who learns, slowly, that perhaps they should stop offering the greeting.
One is being taught to reject. The other is being taught to expect rejection. Neither lesson should be part of childhood.
We spend enormous energy asking what kind of grades our children are getting, which universities they will attend, what careers they will pursue and whether they will succeed in life.
Perhaps we should also ask something simpler. What kind of human beings are we teaching them to become? Are we teaching them that another person’s faith makes them less worthy? Are we teaching them that some citizens belong more than others? Are we teaching them to inherit grievances they never experienced themselves? Are we giving them a history that helps them understand one another or one that teaches them whom to blame?
And when they encounter someone different from themselves, what have we prepared them to see first? The difference? Or the human being?
I have spent much of my life knowing what it feels like to be placed outside an invisible circle. But I don’t want the next generation to inherit those circles simply because we were too unwilling to question them. Perhaps the greatest responsibility we have toward children is not to pass everything we inherited on to them.
Some things deserve to be preserved. Some things deserve to be questioned. And some things – especially hatred – should end with us. Because children will eventually inherit the world we leave behind. They will inherit our books, our histories, our fears, our assumptions and our silences.
The question is: what else will we give them? Perhaps we can give them something better. The freedom to meet a person before meeting their label. The courage to question what they have been taught. The ability to disagree without dehumanising.
And the simple understanding that another human being does not become less worthy of kindness because they are different from us. Perhaps then, when a child says assalamu alaikum, another child will simply answer. And neither of them will have to wonder whether they belong.