Introduction

Abstract

Modern states energetically promote free—and compulsory—education for all as the key to futureprosperity. This means that, beyond a small private education sector, the overwhelming majority of children who will be educated in the twenty-first century, from any faith background including the whole range of “secular” worldviews, will receive their education through a state-funded system. Meanwhile inexorable processes of globalization—including the globalization of religious knowledge, as well as migration—ensure that modern societies, despite fostering uniform values in some areas of life, are increasingly diverse in matters of religion. The proliferating twenty-first century emphasis on individual human rights, combined with the extremely high status of religious rights within that discourse, means that so-called “public” education, including religious education (RE) in its diverse empirical forms, increasingly finds itself in intricate and contentious negotiation with so-called “private” religion.