Faith-Based Education and Equality: Towards an Education of Prejudice? - The Example of Faith Schools in England

Abstract

While education remains strictly speaking within the realm of the state’s duty, the analysis begins by challenging the assumption that autonomy is primarily perceived as personal autonomy. It then explains how normative pluralism may operate on the level of a functional normative system (creating self-governing institutions within education) in the case of Britain, increasingly combined with a background of religious normativity.

Through the use of recent cases on segregation of boys and girls at faith schools, discrimination on admission criteria on the basis on faith to many of these schools as well as the growing discussion of British values taught at those same schools, the analysis will engage with the development of the debate in its broader socio-legal dimensions.

Questioning the decline of religiosity in this field, the paper will set out the major challenges for the liberal state that this new ‘arrangement’ creates. Ultimately, it will also ‘re-read’ state-funded religious education as the next phase in the development of normative pluralism towards the protection of specific ethno-cultural groups in super-diverse contexts.

Keywords: religious freedom, equality, education, faith schools, normative pluralism, multiculturalism