Abstract
In contrast with the United States, all the countries of Western Europe provide public funding for the tuition costs of private (mostly faith-based) schools chosen by parents. While this represents a significant plus for rights of conscience and parental empowerment, it involves also a larger government role in supervising private schools than is the case in the United States. This chapter discusses Germany, the Netherlands, England, Northern Ireland, and Sweden, in each of which there is a well-established tradition of Protestant schooling; public funding is provided so that families can choose to send their children to schools with a religious character, but the arrangements and the assumptions that underlie them differ considerably. Although government supervision extends only to the quality and general content of the instruction, not to the worldview which shapes the life of the school, there is evidence that many Protestant schools have largely lost their distinctiveness as a result of the general secularization of European societies and a failure to work at promoting an alternative vision of education.
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Glenn, C.L. (2012). Educational Freedom and Protestant Schools in Europe. In: Jeynes, W., Robinson, D. (eds) International Handbook of Protestant Education. International Handbooks of Religion and Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2387-0_8
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