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This chapter starts with a brief elaboration of church-state relations in the Netherlands and the presence of the Muslim community in the country. Subsequently, the Dutch education system is explained: in accordance with freedom of education, education is not the sole prerogative of the state, but also of private (religious) institutions. As a result, education is divided into different “pillars”: in addition to the “neutral” governmental schools, there are also Roman Catholic, Protestant Christian, and “other” non-governmental schools - including Islamic schools - which are all funded by the state. Following this model, IRE is organised in different ways, ranging from “impartial” education about Islam in the primary school subject Spiritual Movements to education in Islam in Islamic schools. These different ways of organising IRE are scrutinised, with particular attention to IRE in Islamic primary schools. Stimulated by recent controversies and pedagogical innovations, the chapter ends with some recent trends and initiatives for improvement.

This chapter reconsiders all the previous chapters, focusing on possible linkages between IRE and Citizenship Education (CE). The conceptions of IRE are characterised according to their exclusivity, inclusivity, and plurality. For CE, the notions “minimal citizenship education” and “maximal citizenship education” are used. Next to an exclusive case and some partially plural cases, the majority of cases could be categorised as inclusive combined with a minimal or maximal conception of CE. In some cases the link with CE is not explicitly addressed. Instead of stating clearly the pedagogical aims of both forms of education, there is quite often a strong emphasis in IRE on the importance of countering terrorism and radicalisation.

Within the human rights discipline there seems to be near consensus that non-confessional and non-denominational teaching about religions, including Islam, fosters the promotion of human rights. Most importantly, such teaching may best prepare the pupil, in the terms of the Children’s Rights Convention, for a “responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin”. Nevertheless, teaching about religions has not quite taken off. This short comment ventures into some of the intricacies of international human rights law that may serve as explanations in this regard.

Based on the EKD report Religiöse Bildung ansgesichts von Kofessionslosigkeit as well as on the new curriculum for Roman Catholic RE in the Flemish Community (Belgium), the recent recommendations concerning Protestant-Evangelical RE in Germany will be compared with the recent developments in Roman-Catholic RE in Flanders. A brief sociological sketch makes clear that in both contexts, an increasing number of students enrolled in RE are non-affiliated. Taking this into consideration, I will scrutinize how the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium (Flemish Community) as well as the EKD responded to this new societal situation. To conclude, the new developments in RE in both contexts will be briefly evaluat-ed and suggestions for further comparative research will be made.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, most schools are state-funded, faith-based (mainly Catholic and Protestant) schools, but today this majority of Christian schools is no longer in accordance with the religious view of many parents and students. This, in turn, can lead to a restriction of parental school choice. In this contribution, we will focus on the differences between the Flemish and the Dutch education systems and argue why, in spite of a comparable legal and financial framework, the Dutch educational system is, compared to the Flemish system, better able to guarantee this school choice. The main reasons for this claim are (1) the diversity between different faith-based schools in the Netherlands compared to a more or less mono-religious model in Flanders; (2° the diversity within faith-based schools in the Netherlands, compared to the centralized governance of most Flemish faith-based (Catholic) schools; and (3) the policy of including religious symbols in most Dutch schools, versus a policy of exclusion in most Flemish schools.