Plural public schooling: religion, worldviews and moral education

Abstract

Educators seek to nurture in the hearts and minds of students a sense of moral thinking, action and behaviour. What these constitute is dependent on one’s perspective, or worldview. Moral thinking and action emerge from worldviews or visions of life—religious or secular. In the history of common or public schools educators have linked moral education to traditional religion, severed those ties in favour of secular perspectives, and of late have shifted focus to educating for citizenship. In each case concern regarding whose values, morals and perspectives dominate surfaces. In a society with plural perspectives, no one worldview should dominate public schools that should be ‘open to all’. A plural public school grounds moral decision‐making in worldviews, and encourages students to increase their understanding of worldviews in general, while deepening their own in particular. Hence, perspectives that ground moral convictions come to attain particular importance and significance, and it behooves us to explore rather than ignore them.