Under the shadow of Al‐Andalus? Spanish teenagers’ attitudes and experiences with religious diversity at school

Abstract

Religious education (RE) is a persistently ‘hot topic’ in contemporary Spain. Although nominally Catholic, majority Spanish society tends to be sharply divided with regard to the issue of religion in education: more conservative and Church‐attending parents approve of the still overwhelming presence of Catholic teachers, trained and chosen by the Catholic Church, who teach (confessional Catholic) religion in both public and confessional primary and secondary schools. More liberal or progressive parents reject this ‘intrusion’ of the Church as reminiscent of ‘national Catholicism’ and favour a strict state–Church separation similar to the French laicité model. This bipolar conflict has become more complex recently. The current dynamics of pluralisation of confessional RE at school, which is currently being implemented in several pilot primary schools in districts with high percentages of Muslim (particularly Maghrebien) as well as Protestant (increasingly Latin American) immigrants, meets strong resistance, not only from the Catholic Church, but also from those who struggle for a completely ‘laicist’ solution. The following analysis of qualitative and quantitative questionnaire data designed and collected in the frame of the comparative REDCo project (‘Religion in Education: a contribution to Dialogue or a factor of Conflict in transforming societies of European Countries, sixth framework programme’) presents an approach to youngsters’ attitudes and experiences with confessional RE.

Keywords:

• religion
• education
• youth
• models of religious education
• Spain
• REDCo project

Notes

1. According to the CIS poll from October 1994.

2. As this poll does not distinguish between different religions, the percentage includes believers from different religious backgrounds without regard to any specific denomination.

3. This new subject, called ‘education for citizenship and human rights’ or ‘civil‐ethic education’, according to the different grades, was introduced in the sixth grade of primary school and is being taught throughout all secondary school grades (cf. Table 1).

4. Cf. Statistics and Archive Services of FERE‐CECA and EyG (2008–2009).

5. The percentage rises to 21.25% in the case of the compulsory educational levels.

6. In total, there are 95,353 teachers in these schools, of whom 7039 (7.38%) are members of religious orders. Of these the church‐run schools have 77,998 teachers, of whom 6261 (8.03%) are members of religious orders. Cf. Statistics and Archive Services of FERE‐CECA and EyG (2008–2009).

7. With regard to the number of pupils in these Catholic schools, in primary education there are 535,483 in total, of whom 444,425 (83%) attend these schools. In secondary schools, there are 415,602 pupils, of which 347,902 (83.71%) attend these schools. Finally, at pre‐university level, from a total number of 103,203 students, 84,308 (81.69%) attend these schools. Cf. Servicio de Estadística y Archivos FERE‐CECA y EyG (2008–2009).

8. Instituto Nacional de Estadistica. La enseñaza de la religión. Curso 2007–2008 [National Statistics Institute. The teaching of religion. Year 2007–2008]. For more details see http://www.ine.es (p. 6).

9. With the aim of guaranteeing the anonymity of the schools, we eliminated names and explicit references to them from the discussion of the research findings.

10. For the interviewee acronyms, see the explanation in the Appendix.

11. Means from here on are calculated on the Likert scale: 1 = strongly agree, 2 = agree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = disagree, 5 = strongly disagree.

12. Means of estimates, scale from 1 – strongly agree to 5 – strongly disagree.

13. Standard variation for these figures is 1.0 with a low standard deviation. This indicates a small degree of dispersion in the answers and a general average close to the central value (agree).

14. This means that 61.3 % of the students strongly agree or agree and that only 8.5% disagree, 5 = strongly disagree. Similar levels apply to other questions where ‘most’ is used.

15. Ethics, ‘society culture, religion’, education for citizenship, religious facts, etc., have been the only non‐confessional alternatives.