ABSTRACT
All religions, although not identical with culture, contain and develop cultural traditions. Public education as introduction into cultural traditions, among other objectives, relies heavily on the religious part of culture. In Europe, for centuries it was self-evident that religious instruction had the task of trans-mitting fundamental social values and overarching worldview perspectives, mainly taken from Christian traditions. Moreover, in nearly all European societies, the religious factor in general had a great impact on the development of education, in terms of both fundamental values of education regarding the idea of “formation” and institutionalized forms of education in public school systems (Heimbrock 2004). Today, however, in European societies (like in many others), the role and influence on education of individual religious con-victions and religious practice of groups such as churches, synagogues, and mosques is highly debated and contested. Due to cultural pluralization, there is presently a substantial controversy in Europe about how to express reli-gious beliefs in schools in secular democratic societies. When opting for the possibility to do so, how can this be done while neither violating the schools’ neutrality nor the individual’s freedom of religion?
