ABSTRACT
Understanding and appreciating the beliefs and practices of others feature prominently among the aims and purposes of Religious Education in UK schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from the ‘Does RE Work?’ project, this paper presents two conceptions of ‘in/entoleration’ a deliberate process of inculcating tolerance in pedagogy. Entoleration, akin to enculturation, encourages sympathetic and transformative encounter with others’ beliefs. Intoleration, akin to indoctrination, risks eliding both difference and encounter in the service of a predetermined aim of nurturing uncritical tolerance. The former is categorised by pedagogies of encounter with the other as person, while the latter often focuses on externals and strangeness.
