Are Islamist schools a threat to U.S.?

• Position: Education - Indoctrination and terrorism

From the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, the U.S. funded and encouraged the creation of militant Islamist schools in Pakistan to help combat Soviet expansionism. Today, these institutions inculcate thousands of students with an ideology of intolerance, violence, and hate. With Saudi backing, similar establishments are proliferating all over the globe.

In "Education and Indoctrination in the Muslim World: Is There a Problem? What Can We Do About It?," Andrew Coulson, a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Midland, Mich., details the threat posed by militant Islamist schooling. Recognizing the gravity of that threat in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. has adopted a two-pronged strategy: encouraging governments in the Muslim world to moderate the curricula employed by radical schools and funding the expansion of free public education to attract families away from those institutions.

However, Coulson concludes that neither approach is likely to succeed. All past efforts to moderate these teachings have failed and, even if these institutions modernized their curricula, they likely would remain ideologically extremist. What's more, the public schools in countries like Pakistan can be as guilty of fomenting religious intolerance as are the radical Islamist ones.

According to the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, a Pakistani think tank, the nation's public school textbooks "tell lies, create hate, incite jehad [sic] and shahadat...