11 Preface P How can Christian trainee teachers be adequately prepared to fulfil their duties towards children and youth in a society that can no longer be characterised as Christian? This question came to me when I started my job at Driestar Christian University for Teacher Education in 2017. I witnessed both academic instructors and school representatives wrestling with new challenges concerning citizenship education, as urged or even imposed by national and international authorities. The lively discussions involved, shifted between the desire to respond positively to understandable social concerns, on the one hand, and the idea of defending the freedom of individual, religiously bound education, on the other hand. Somewhat later, I encountered the same question and discussions in international circles, such as the International Network for Christian Higher Education (INCHE) and the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI). What these discussions lacked, however, was a clear awareness of the depth of the cultural change that Western countries such as the Netherlands—and, to some extent, as a result of globalisation, all countries of the world—had experienced in recent decades. I vividly remember Driestar Christian University’s celebration, in 2019, of its 75th anniversary, where a keynote speaker from a liberal think tank (1) expressed deep concern with regard to Christian education and the freedom of religious education that makes it possible. He offered two reasons for his standpoint. First, he wanted children to not be immersed in any form of religion. Second, he accused Christian schools of being too removed from general society to be helpful in the crucial task of integrating all kinds of people from very different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds. His keynote speech itself was an illustration of how the Netherlands had changed from a relatively homogeneous country with strong Christian roots into an open and plural society in a globalised world. As a theologian, it was easy for me to disagree with the speaker’s first objection to religious education, but as a political scientist, I could understand his second objection. Are education and schooling not always a function of and for society? And is it not reasonable that national and international authorities sometimes appeal to this functionality when preoccupied with, for example, polarisation or the lack of social cohesion? It might have been my intercultural background that helped me to view the problem from this perspective and to question what it means today to form Christian teachers to take their place in society and the world as it actually is. For 10 years I lived and worked with my family in Ecuador. Immediately 1 Patrick van Schie, Teldersstichting VVD.
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