Abstract
As colleague and co-worker of Professor Bennie van der Walt, the author has been in a position for several decades now to apply some of Bennie van der Walt’s philosophical and theological insights in the field of education. Professor Van der Walt’s recent discussion and critique of secularism and of religious tolerance enables the author to analyse the educational situation in South Africa and elsewhere with particular emphasis on policies about religion in/and education. These investigations lead him to conclude that most education systems seem to resort to secular public-private and worldly-sacral dualistic policies for addressing the problem of potential religious conflict in schools. After considering the Dutch policy of (increasing) pillarisation and the South African policy of banning confessional aspects of religious education to the private spheres of citizens’ lives, he proposes a solution based on the concept of institutional religious and life-conceptual identity. This approach can also lead to religious tolerance among learners in schools (as mooted by Bennie van der Walt and others) while circumventing the pitfalls of secularism.
Highlights
Since my appointment as a lecturer in Education at the former Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education in 1975, I have enjoyed the privilege of working closely with Professor Bennie van der Walt
Because of the deep divisions among South Africans, tolerance along the lines demarcated by Van der Walt above will not be possible in the short term, which explains why it has to be entrenched in law
Given the long history of the dualistic public-private Laicité philosophy in well-established democracies such as France and the United States of America, it would be futile to hope that the democracy in South Africa would mature in the short term to the levels described in the previous section
Summary
Since my appointment as a lecturer in Education at the former Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education in 1975, I have enjoyed the privilege of working closely with Professor Bennie van der Walt. At that time, he was the Director of the Institute for Reformational Studies (IRS). I was glad to find that he had included these articles on secularism in his book Transforming power: challenging contemporary secular society (Van der Walt, B.J. 2007:221-296) His depiction and critique of secularism are useful for coming to grips with the situation in post-1994 South Africa. Let me first outline the problem that this article deals with
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