Religion and Education: the Czech Situation (Review)

“In contemporary Europe, the relationship between religion and education is a frequently debated topic. In Western European countries, such as Great Britain, Norway, and the Netherlands, it became discussed as early as in the 1960s and as the number of foreign immigrants increased, it gradually became more and more pressing. Many countries started to realize that in an ethnically and religiously pluralistic society, uniting all the inhabitants of a state on the basis of a single Christian creed is extremely difficult. Consequently, while confessional education kept its place in the school curricula, the educational space started to open itself to reflection of other religious traditions.” So states Zuzana Černá in the introduction to her doctoral thesis, which was defended in 2017 at the Department of Religious Studies of the Faculty of Arts, University of Pardubice, and which has recently been published.1 She also insists that in the countries of Eastern Europe, interest in the problem only started to getting stronger in the 1990s (allowing for differences between the countries). Černá believes that the greatest rise in interest came after September 11, 2001 when the Council of Europe issued a series of recommendations related to the issue. According to Černá, it was precisely at this time that the Czech Republic realized the need to use the conclusions of Religious Studies in religious education, both at the grammar school and high school levels.2 The most pressing matter at hand, which has to be conveyed to Czech students, is the support of pluralistic society, respect to foreign cultures (especially the non-European ones), and prevention of future conflicts. In her monograph, Černá asks herself the following core question: “How does our cultural tradition refer to the ‘otherness’ of Non-European cultures?” Černá seeks to answer the question by means of analyzing randomly selected high school textbooks of History, Geography, and Social Sciences. She identifies the paragraphs which either define the different religions of the world or emphasize religions in the context of describing both European and Non-European cultural realities and their historical and geographical dimensions. She bases her work primarily on a comparative study of cultures proposed by S. N. Balagangadhara and his team of researchers based at the University of Ghent. In his work, Balagangadhara insists that Western Religious Studies and its approach to Non-European cultures has always