Abstract
The chapter is based mainly on the quantitative study run within the EU-funded REDCo-project “Religion in education: A contribution to dialogue or a factor of conflict in transforming societies of European countries” run from 2006 to 2009. The project aimed to generally research the potentials religion in education has as a factor to promote peaceful coexistence between people with different religions, worldviews and cultural backgrounds in Europe. In this chapter a summary is given of the findings of the REDCo quantitative study with regard to Muslim students and Islam. The differences found with regard to the role of religion in pupils’ life, religion in school, and the impact of religion in society according to the students where the views and attitudes of Muslim students compared to Chris-tian students and students with no religion are presented and discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
These classifications follow those of the students themselves, however not differentiating between different Christian and Muslim sects on one side and classifying also those students who claim having a non-religious worldview like ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’ as students with ‘no religion’. The group of students with ‘other religions’ is very heterogeneous, including, for example, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Heathens, Pagans, Satanists, and ‘own religion’, and in most countries very small, so we will not refer to it anymore in the course of this analysis.
- 3.
Students with ‘no religion’ are students who do not consider themselves as having a specific religion or worldview.
- 4.
For a more comprehensive version of the analysis presented here see Jozsa (2009).
- 5.
When differences between Muslim students respective to Christian students and students with no religion are mentioned, they mean statistically significant differences using different statistical tests (correlation analysis, the Man and Whitney test or the Kruskal-Wallis test). For the statistical testing SPSS 17 was used and the samples used were those collected within the REDCo-project.
- 6.
- 7.
See Willaime (2007) for a description of the situation regarding religion in education in France.
- 8.
From the federal states taken into account in the German sample only Hamburg has a model of ‘religious education for all’ that is somehow special. However, also for the students in Hamburg the school has a lower importance as a source of information about religion when compared to the family; see also Jozsa, Knauth, and Weisse, (2009). For a description of the situation regarding religious education in Germany, see Knauth (2007) and Jozsa (2007).
- 9.
See Dietz (2007) for a description of the situation regarding religious education in Spain.
- 10.
In the Netherlands sample 23% of the students did not attend RE, 39% attended compulsory confessional religious education and 38% compulsory non-confessional religious education; see also Bertram-Troost et al. (2009). For a description of the situation regarding religious education in the Netherlands, see ter Avest et al. (2007).
- 11.
See Table 4 where the percentages of students who stated that they attend religious education at the time of the questioning are given for the different groups as well as the means of the years of attendance during their school life.
- 12.
50% of the Muslim students in the Dutch sample came from a confessional Islamic school with a compulsory Islamic religious education model, and 44% from Christian schools, where religious education is also compulsory and, from the legal status, also confessional, but in fact more or less ‘confessional’ regarding the content of the teaching, depending on the school. The reason why only 75% of the students with no religion and 80% of the Christian students attended religious education in the Dutch sample is that a considerable number of these students attended schools where no religious education was offered or the subject dealing with religion was called ‘History of culture and Christianity’ or ‘Worldview’, apparently not always regarded by the students as ‘religious education’ (see also Bertram-Troost, Miedema, ter Avest, & Bakker, 2009).
- 13.
In Germany this is true for all federal states included in the sample with the exception of Hamburg; see the remarks made above in this respect and Knauth (2007).
- 14.
Around 0.1% of the people identified themselves as Muslims in Estonia in a census run in 2000; the data of the Estonian census of 2000 are available online at: http://www.stat.ee/censuses (see Schihalejev, 2008).
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Jozsa, DP. (2011). Islam in Education: A Contribution to Dialogue or a Factor of Conflict?. In: Sporre, K., Mannberg, J. (eds) Values, Religions and Education in Changing Societies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9628-9_4
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