Page 55 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

MERGING IDENTITIES. EXPERIMENTS IN DUTCH PRIMARY EDUCATION
The second question in the survey, concerning the restricted identity,
was directed to the legal obligation of the cooperation schools to offer 2 public education. To find out how the values of this public education are
recognizable in religious education, the respondents were questioned about
the very concrete transfer of these values within the restricted identity.
One question was asked about this transfer: “How do you offer religious education
according to values of public education?” As Fig. 5 shows, nine principals answer
by referring to the lessons in which students are educated about different religions.
Apparently, these principals consider this education to be a central characteristic
of public education.
Nine principals recognize values of public education by providing voluntarily
religious education according to the Protestant or Catholic denomination. Four
respondents (also) offer voluntary religious education according to humanistic
values. Six principals see values of public education in lessons in public, secular
education on a voluntary basis. Three schools offer obligatory public, secular
education. Further research may tell us more about the content of this obligatory
secular education, and compare it to other ways of offering religious education:
do the respondents see this education as different from e.g. the education about
religions and, more importantly, how do they claim to insure that non-government
education is expressed, as the law indicates?
These results show that all respondents recognize the values of public education in the offering of (some kind of) religious education within their school, but they also show that the organization of religious education differs greatly with regard to these values.
4.6. Conclusions and discussion
4.6.1. Conclusions
Formally a cooperation school is not a public school. However, students at these schools do visit a school where values of public education are supported, and where this education is offered. This is an important first conclusion, concerning the integrated identity.
A cooperation school is based on the key value of equality, which corresponds with the active multiformity of a public school. In practice, this means that the
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