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Religion and religious education in schools

Yes, it happens in other countries as well, so as an example let’s have a look at this:

    After a four-year legal battle by the teenager Yunus Mitschele Germany's top administrative court has ruled that students do not have an automatic right to pray at school.

    When he and several other pupils kneeled in a hallway during a break to pray he was told by his head teacher that prayer was not allowed on the school grounds.

    The German constitution guarantees freedom of religion. So a pupils would generally be entitled to pray when at school, outside of lesson times. But the court decided that if religious acts were allowed the conflict that might be expected at the school would be beyond the level that school staff could deal with.

So...

“Unity by diversity” - by Meike Duch

... what do we learn from this court decision? And even more important, what do pupils learn from it?

Conflicts resulting from differences in religious ideas might be expected. Well, that might be in the nature of things. The question is how to deal with these conflicts.

Here is the answer:
Embrace the wonderful opportunity to teach children and young adults to be a tolerant part of a diverse community!

The answer can not be to ban religion from schools. That would be a sad waist of a great lesson to learn. Besides that you could have saved the expenses for court and a lot of time.

And it you are an open-minded teacher it shouldn’t even be that hard to do because in the human nature already lays the desire to build a community, to have friends, to be loved.

If you just ban the origin of conflict, in this case a prayer, instead of teaching them to find a peaceful solution for this conflict, you raise people who are not able to to solve conflicts other than by dispelling the origin of diversity. History shows where that leads to.

So, schools, please take the chance and raise tolerant generations, citizens who can not just accept each others differences but generations who can appreciate differences as a chance to show respect to and value distinctions.

And...

... what would have happened if you would have assembled the pupils with a capable mediator to find an intelligent solution themselves?
They would have found a solution they agree on, which would have made their community a community to be proud on - tolerant, respectful, intelligent.

Wouldn’t that have been nice...?

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