A world of difference

Abstract

Articles published by the BJRE are first published online. When the editorial team puts together a new issue, we therefore have a selection of these online articles to choose from. We have tried, over the years, to have a range of materials from a range of countries. It may be the ‘British’ journal of religious education, but it has had an international range since its inception. (The first editor of the journal under its current name was the UK-based Australian academic John Hull, so an international reach was already ‘baked in’ to the journal’s perspective from at least the 1970s.) More recently, it has been a joy to see new countries represented in the issues. This has led to challenges, of course: it is not easy to speak to an international audience when the different countries and regions have such different experiences of, and policies on, religious education. However, we are confident that these challenges are making a world of difference to the journal. The current issue is a fine illustration of this. There are several themes addressed by the articles, and within each theme, there are different approaches from different jurisdictions around the world. I have started with conflict, as conflict is seen, variously, as the biggest problem for religious education, or as something that can be resolved by religious education and therefore as RE’s greatest contribution to the education of children and young people. More than a decade ago, a major research project explored RE’s contribution to dialogue and conflict (Avest et al. 2009), and these are complex issues. A school without any conflict is false; a school riven by conflict is damaging. How can conflict be used creatively to help contribute to learning (e.g. through cognitive dissonance, and the dialogic sharing of different opinions) without pushing people apart? The first article in this issue of the BJRE explores conflicts in French state school, with Ismail Ferhat’s article Quantified secularism? Counting religious conflicts in French state schools since the 1980s. France is all-too-rarely represented in RE research, as RE is not present in most state schools, but Ferhat explores whether this absence is helpful or problematic. Well, it is clear for anyone who has followed news on religion in France that there is no simple ‘solution’ offered by secularity or laïcité, and yet it is difficult to research religious conflicts in schools in a culture that has difficulty defining what such conflicts might be, let alone how to resolve them. I remember reading of the campaign to ensure children and young people should eat pork in French schools (Chrisafis 2015), because not eating pork could be construed as a form of religious observance which a secular state should not support. Ferhat shows how challenging it is even to know what is happening in schools. From the potential for conflict in France with a secularist education system, to the research by Anna Zellma, Roman Buchta and Wojciech Cichosz on the potential for conflict in Poland with a Catholic religious education system. There is a world of difference between these two broadlyCatholic societies. Jarosław Horowski also writes about religious education in Poland and complements the article by Zellma and colleagues, adding a more theological perspective, whilst coming to a similar conclusion about the challenges. In both France and Poland, young people seem increasingly distant from conventional religion, but the implications for their very different approaches to religion in school is of course quite different. The changes to come are most interesting, I think. Pakistan is a very different context, but one where, like in France and in Poland, religion and education are tied to wider social changes and conflicts, in some discomforting ways. Qasim Jan, Yi Xie, Muhammad Habib Qazi, Zahid Javid Choudhary and Baha Ul Haq explore the ways in which nationally-endorsed RE textbooks may have ‘normalised’ Taliban violence in Pakistan. This is such complex and difficult research, it is good to see it tackled with great subtlety here. As the authors say, BRITISH JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2022, VOL. 44, NO. 3, 209–212 https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2022.2076377