Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's view that "dress and symbols do make a difference" in his government's effort to promote racial and religious integration and harmony is obviously shortsighted and untenable.

How could harmony and tolerance be promoted when seven-year-olds are denied the right to quality education of government schools just because of their parents insistence that they wear the tudung (headscarf)?

I really pity the innocent pupils who are torn between their parents insistence and the education ministrys unbending rules.

If the pupils were not allowed to wear their headscarves, their Muslim parents will only be forced to send their daughters to a "madrasah" ( religious school), as the parents of one of them have already said they would do.

The chances of they, in this instance, absorbing radical religious views are much more than wearing headscarves in government schools receiving secular education.

Religion is a private matter. The young people benefit more if they are taught that everyone is entitled to their private religious beliefs.

Those who wear headscarves will appreciate the right of others in the class who wear turbans or those, whether Muslims or non Muslims, who do not care to wear any religious thing, and vice versa.

They also learn the important principle that the pursuit of secular rational and empirical knowledge may be freely pursued without sacrifice of private religious and theological beliefs.

No one is or ought to be forced to choose between the two. Only then can one call itself a secular society.

The headscarf ban is counterproductive and outweighs the principles in support of it. It also infers negative stereotyping mixed with paranoia of any form of Islamic expression by Singapore in the Sept 11 aftermath. It will only make the Muslim community in Singapore feel alienated and trample on sensitivities of its many Muslim neighbors. This is really bad foreign and public relations.

Although it is not given to us as Malaysians to interfere with another's internal affairs and dictate to Singapore, a sovereign state, as to what best it should decide for itself, no one, including the best and brightest among Singapore elites can claim that they always uphold the truth, and all including us, have the right in public discourse to debate and discuss on common issues that are directly or indirectly related to the concern of the global community after Sept 11.

Given the intellectual arrogance of certain Singapore leaders in the certainty of their worldviews, they are of course not likely to benefit from dissenting voices within much less outside the republic.