Religious Toleration, Education and the Headscarf Dispute

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This chapter provides a reconstruction and discussion of different, conflicting positions in the public controversy over a ban on headscarves in kindergartens and public schools. The wearing of headscarves in public institutions belongs to the classical topics and objects of debates about (religious) toleration and its limits. The topic (again) has become increasingly politically contentious in recent years, largely due the ban on the wearing of headscarves in kindergartens and primary schools in Austria and political proposals for corresponding bans in Germany. Opponents of headscarves in kindergartens and public schools appeal in part to a specific interpretation of the state requirement of neutrality. For example, they assume that the headscarf cannot be reconciled with the free and self-confident development of children and that it is an expression of religious coercion. Headscarf advocates, on the other hand, interpret the proposed ban as an expression of antireligious, intolerant and specifically antimuslim symbolic politics, and argue that it would amount to a restriction of the fundamental rights of parents and children (including their freedom of religion). I will begin by clarifying the relevant principles of secularism as aspects of the more general ideal of state neutrality. Then I will go on to discuss the most important arguments put forward by the opponents of headscarves and argue that a corresponding state “unveiling decree” would be incompatible with basic principles of liberal politics and education, suitably interpreted.