22 Introduction the Great Transformation (Kuiper, 2021; Polanyi, 1944). Together, they refer to global processes such as the exponential growth of the world’s population, urbanisation, increasing mobility and migration, advances in communication technology and, finally, globalisation, which can be considered causes or accelerators of radical changee in the world’s ecosystems and cultures (Kooijman & van Olst, 2017). In Western countries in particular, a strong process of secularisation has been identified (Taylor, 2007). The French philosopher Chantal Delsol (2021) argued that this tendency has now, in the last few decades, reached a climax indicating nothing less than the definitive end of 16 centuries of Christian dominance over politics and culture (11). Instead of becoming increasingly Christian, as teacher trainers such as Prideaux (1940) envisioned, Western societies have become highly plural, thereby encompassing a wide range of religious, political and ethical viewpoints. More than ever before, these societies are characterised by two main features: diversity and complexity. Vertovec (2007), writing specifically about the United Kingdom (UK), referenced both diversity and complexity and chose super-diversity as a central predicate to ‘underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced’ (p. 1024). For his part, Barnett (2000) opted for super-complexity. What both qualifications mean to express is that—as Vertovec (2007) phrases it—diversity per se is nothing new, although ‘the interplay of factors’ and ‘the emergence of their scale’ are (pp. 1025–1026). According to Barnett (2000), complexity per se is nothing new either, whereas ‘the handling of multiple frames of understanding, of action and of self-identity by which we might understand the world’ (p. 6) is, in fact, novel. The relative homogeneity of Western countries has given way to societies comprised of a mixture of people with very different ethnical and cultural backgrounds and life convictions, a mixture who live closely together within the boundaries of the law but differ fundamentally in their answers to basic questions concerning sense-giving and meaning. The bridges that school teachers need to make, therefore, have become substantially longer. As a consequence, the school, if it wishes to serve as a mini-society or a halfway house where the art of living together and the art of creating social cohesion are practiced, must teach students to emerge from their safe spaces and relate to this rapidly developed heterogeneity of super-diversity and super-complexity. This study does not intend to approach the aforementioned diversity and complexity as a threat. The resultant change can be perceived that way, 11 Delsol (2021) discussed Chrétienté (or Christendom), meaning Christen-dominance.
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