Page 57 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

MERGING IDENTITIES. EXPERIMENTS IN DUTCH PRIMARY EDUCATION
4.6.2. Suggestions for further research
The first suggestion for further research concerns the organization of religious 2 education.
Two aspects of this education are important. First, we could focus on this religious education in comparison to values of public education. Since a majority of the respondents indicate that religious education is segregated, it could be interesting to investigate in what way the value of active multiformity is expressed by this segregation: how does the acknowledgement of religious diversity correspond with this organization of religious education?
Further research concerning religious education could also investigate the content of religious education according to public education. The results show little conformity concerning this education. One might like to discover whether it is education about different religions, or whether it can be identified strictly with the education as offered by the external religiously affiliated teacher. Similar questions are whether it can be received from a lesson guide that was written for Protestant and/or Catholic religious education, but without the biblical stories and the suggestions for prayer, or whether religious education, identified as public education, can have a profile of its own. We might learn the answer to this last question from the four cooperation schools who claim to provide public religious education for all students. We would like to understand how values of both public and non-government education can be identified in this collective religious education. There seems to be a difference between the schools of the seventeen respondents and the schools of the non-response with regard to religious education. Many of the respondents schools are a merger of a public and a Protestant school ánd offer segregated religious education, whereas the majority of the non-response has a public and a (Roman-)Catholic origin and seems to provide collective religious education. It may be possible that a collective religious identity is more common at schools that are a merger of public and (Roman-) Catholic than at schools with public and Protestant origins.
It would be quite interesting to discover what these schools with collective religious education can teach us about the motivations and the ways in which religious education contributes to the dialogue between students (and teachers) with different kind of religious backgrounds.
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