Page 53 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

MERGING IDENTITIES. EXPERIMENTS IN DUTCH PRIMARY EDUCATION
religious identity of the school plays or has played an important role?” Thirteen
respondents say they can, and refer to concrete activities. For example, the 2 celebrations of religious feasts are mentioned: “Christmas always returns as a yearly
point of discussion. Do we or do we not celebrate this feast in church?” (Respondent
I). But the religious identity is also shown in lessons in religious education,
in the choice of themes in these lessons and in the selection of staff members.
The majority of the respondents indicates that the religious identity is often
or always discussed during another concrete activity: the job interviews with
potentially new staff and the intakes with parents. All seventeen principals say
they discuss the religious identity of the school during these activities at least
occasionally.
We asked two questions about the organization of religious education in order to find out in what ways this organization provides possibilities to handle the religious plurality of the students and the legal obligation to offer public as well as non-government education.
Fig. 4 N=17
(more answers possible)
Our first question was about possible ways of organizing religious education. Four options were provided: do students attend lessons of voluntarily denominational religious education, is religious education divided into separated lessons according to the religious origins of the merged schools, do students attend religious education in a collective way, do the teachers provide education about different religions?
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