ABSTRACT
The legal challenge in regulating and promoting religious diversity in public education across very different countries has one common basis: it presupposes the development and subsequent use of mechanisms that while engaging with legal, political and religious systems, recognize a base of broadly shared values. These values allow for negotiation to take place when conflicts arise. The use of religion and religious identity in this chapter serves a dual purpose: first, to highlight existing inequalities in and through education between the different ethnic groups, but second, also to stress its potential use as a pathway to address these inequalities. In the context of the regulatory level of religious difference in public education, one should stress how religion follows modernity by transforming its agenda through a constant negotiation between its dogmatic principles with the socio-cultural contexts. Legal pluralism becomes, therefore, reflected within public education through individualized belief that often escapes the religious institutional aspects of faith.
