Page 22 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 1
specific religious tradition in this education: “To teach each child in its own faith and in its own version of that faith risks the social harmony and tolerance at which education aims” (Knight 1998, 70).
4.2.2 Equality
We interpret the concept of equality in two ways.
First, we see equality as a value that makes it possible to treat every student’s opinion and every voice in a multireligious society as valuable for dialogue. No point of view is dominant. Religious education aims at fostering the sense of equality (Zondervan 2012). Religious education needs to foster students’ attitude of equality, trust and respect in encountering others, building bridges between people of diverse religious perspectives (Miedema and Ter Avest, 2011; Keaten and Soukup, 2009). Our second interpretation of the concept of equality is the way schools deal with sources in religious education. In the plural context of Western societies, we see that a diversity of sources and traditions can provide existential meaning: people create their personal identity from a variety of sources (Mulder 2012). In the context of religious diversity, the equality of religious sources has to be advanced in religious education. When diversity is a feature of the student population and of society, a multiplicity of sources are worth being explored by students (Boeve 2004; Vermeer 2004). In these interpretations of equality, the encounter in religious education is enriched by the plurality of student backgrounds as well as by a dialogue with several religious sources.
4.3 Religious education
Although we are aware of other terms (e.g. ‘worldview education’, cf. Van der Kooij 2016; Valk 2017), we follow the current dominant and international use of the term ‘religious education’. We underline the commonalities between the concept of worldview education and religious education. Although we use the term ‘religious education’ for the pragmatic reason that we seek to follow the dominant discourse, we interpret this in the same broad sense as worldview education. We recognize the link between the concepts in the following guiding principles. First, our interpretation deals with the important role of worldview traditions, religious and non-religious sources, in their “considerable depth and longstanding contributions (...) to culture, science and learning” (Valk 2007, 281). Traditions concern questions about life and death and “ground particular moral values and action, and offer responses to the profound moral and worldview dilemmas” (Valk
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