Education and Religious Symbols in the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain: Uniformity or Subsidiarity?

Abstract

The argument about the display of religious symbols in schools is ostensibly about the extent to which they might have any detrimental effect on impressionable minors. However, its more fundamental importance is as part of the broader debate about the place of religion in wider society: both the extent to which personal religious preferences should be accommodated and the degree to which liberal democracies may legitimately exhibit any kind of overt religious character - and both are fundamental to the issue of social cohesion.