Chapter 3 56 upon which one would base the decision to be tolerant in a certain situation. As Vogt (1997) concludes, an individual in a civilised society should know how to consider where, and on what principles, to draw the boundary between what is and what is not to be tolerated. This means that ‘teaching tolerance effectively includes teaching how to think about both what should and what should not be tolerated’ (Vogt, 1997: xix). That requires teachers to be able to reason about tolerance themselves, in order to teach it to their pupils. When the question is about how to teach tolerance, we already mentioned that classroom diversity is often mentioned as a way of teaching children to live together with others who are culturally and religiously different. However, as we described in the previous section, the classroom in a strong religious school regularly has a homogeneous religious population and highlights its own community. Furthermore, encounters with religious others or exposure to stories of religious others might cause tensions in strong religious schools, since this could conflict with the emphasis on their own religious convictions (cf. Pons-de Wit, 2017). Yet, De Wolff (2006) argues that the characteristics of strong religious primary schools are not barriers to adequate citizenship education in liberal-democratic societies per se (cf. Bertram-Troost, 2017).31 In fact, socialisation in a specific conception of ‘the good’ can be especially powerful in developing ethical reasoning (MacMullen, 2004), which includes reasoning about tolerance. However, MacMullen (2004) argues that within the framework of the primary socialisation environment it is important to introduce a limited form of ethical reasoning. This means, for example, that the teacher should ask and encourage “questions that invite rational analysis and interpretation rather than recitation of dogma” (MacMullen, 2004, p. 613), and they should highlight ‘hard cases within the religious doctrine where reasonable disagreement exists even among the faithful’ (MacMullen, 2004: 613). This is also related to the ‘dialogical competence’ that pupils should learn at school with regard to the presence of religious others in society (De Wolff, 2006; Strike, 2000a; Van Leest-Borst, 2005). This competence involves three essential components: competence in the primary moral language, competence in the public moral language and competence in hermeneutical discourse between different moral languages (Strike, 2000a). This competence is not only relevant for strong religious schools, but for all schools. Which components are most challenging might differ: for strong religious schools, the second and third competences 31 This is based on the assumption that it is necessary to allow peoples’ personal moral views into the public debate about our society. That contribution should, however, meet certain criteria, namely that it is understandable and acceptable to everyone, and that it is not in conflict with values that are part of the public morality (De Wolff, 2006).
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