Introduction part 5: Religion and learning

Abstract

Religious diversity in the education context provokes myriad dilemmas on policy, pragmatic and normative levels. The integration of minority religions within public education systems poses challenges for learning and policy; but this relates at a broader level to normative and political debates surrounding national identity, multiculturalism and assimilation. While educationalists are preoccupied with the influence of religion over learning processes, and social scientists with the dynamics of integration in the context of religion and learning, political and legal theorists are concerned with religion and learning as a site of conflicting normative and social claims on the values of religious freedom, equality, multiculturalism and individual autonomy, which refracts and exemplifies states’ public philosophies. The salience of culture and religion in the learning process is set within a broader normative and policy question of how a reconciliation between individual autonomy and respect for religious diversity may be achieved. The challenge of ensuring that individuals’ religious preferences are neither undermined by a dominant culture, nor used to essentialize them within a particular group or community, appears particularly intense in this context. What are religious minorities’ responses to the social and political processes assigning particular statuses and identities to them, and to the use of educational systems in the formation and reproduction of both identity and belief?.