US and Saudi Arabia want to educate Pakistanis: how nice

"The United States is not the only benefactor interested in popularising the love of learning in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s other faithful benefactor, has over the years been involved in similar philanthropic contributions. One of these ventures, the International Islamic Relief Organisation runs a large orphanage in Islamabad, which educates, houses and clothes thousands of young destitute Pakistani children.  This orphanage is but one public face of Saudi investment in Pakistan education; the private face is equally well known.  One Wikileaks cable from late 2008 by the American consulate in Lahore records in detail the activities of Saudi charities in funding hundreds of Deobandi-oriented religious schools in those areas. Like the Americans, the Saudis also fund teacher training and invite hundreds of madressah educators to Saudi Arabia on fully funded trips for just this purpose.  The Saudi and American efforts to educate Pakistanis are substantively different. The Americans are pushing a curriculum that ostensibly promotes democracy and pluralism, imagines the child as a budding scholar and not a soldier, the world as holding opportunity and not only temptation.  The Saudi curriculum banks on other truths — of salvation gained in another life, of a world of ascetic self-sacrifice, of the necessity of domination and the inevitability of destruction. The American promises are of here and now — open to being evaluated on the scales of reality — the Saudi ones for the hereafter, untouchable and perfect in their utopic potential." (thanks Sultan)