The Morning Prayer in Greek Kindergartens as a Field of Exercising Multiculturalism

Abstract

Religious education has been an issue of social and political debate in many countries but mostly in countries where people from different national, cultural and religious origins live. Religious identity is a core element of a person’s identity that constitutes a crucial right of the person and its personal freedom. Every country and every state should protect the right of its citizens to exercise their religious duties. One of these duties is the prayer. However, some countries that experienced waves of migration during the last years do not have yet adjusted to taking the proper measures in order to overcome the transformation of the cultural composition of the their people. Greece is one of these countries. In Greek schools, every morning, the pupils and the teachers pray according to the ritual of the Greek Orthodox Church. This lead us to the research question of this paper: what happens with pupils whose religious faith is different and how do teachers face this problem? Our research hypothesis is that the way that teachers cope with the issue of the Morning Prayer is an issue of multicultural education, as well. For the purpose of our study we asked from 99 kindergarten teachers to inform us on (a) how they cope with the Morning Prayer and (b) how they treat the presence of children from culturally diverse backgrounds. Teachers’ responses show that a remarkable percentage of the kindergarten teachers do not cope with this specific issue in a dogmatic way. They try to exercise a multicultural pedagogic in their classrooms. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n2p65