Ethnic diversity, Christian hegemony and the emergence of multi-faith religious education in the 1970s (original) (raw)
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Current aims of the role and position of religious education in public schools at the global scale are still lingering between transmitting or instructing a specific religious system of faith to responding to the challenges of globalization and super-diversity in more holistic terms. In other words, the constitutionally declared secular States are presently realizing the need to move beyond the mere acknowledgement of the relevance of religion to more pro-active attempts to control and/or at least influence prevalent discourses on religions as they are connected to religious diversity management. But states are not alone. This process is spearheaded considerably by the presence of religious institutions as actors within the education system. For education, this translates into attempts to influence and even control in some cases how beliefs and traditions are taught (e.g. through textbooks) with the broader intention to construct positive imagery of certain faiths. The paper will illustrate the growing awareness that non-state religious institutions and actors are increasing their leverage in organizing and dispensing public education with evidence from publicly funded education from England. They challenge the limits of the liberal state, using autonomy and human rights discourses towards the construction of pluri-legality through the content, the modalities and the implications of education for co-existence. Through the example of faith schools in Britain, the discussion will illustrate the new discursive opportunities to negotiate and re-shape a central fundamental right, such as the right to education, in conjunction with other essential rights such as the freedom of religion and that to equality. Questioning the impact of the decline of religiosity in this field, the chapter will set out the major challenges for the liberal constitutional state that this new ‘arrangement’ creates. Ultimately, it will also ‘re-read’ state-funded religious education as the next phase in the development of normative pluralism towards the protection of specific ethno-cultural groups in super-diverse contexts in multicultural and intercultural theoretical frameworks.
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