Debates about religion and education internationally often presume the neutrality of secular education governance, as an irrefutable public good. However, understandings of secular freedom, rights and neutrality in schooling are continuously contested, and social movements have disrupted the notion there is a uniform public to be educated. Simultaneously, unjust, neo-liberal and majoritarian education policies constantly undermine collective notions of what is good and just. The book examines how education policy positions religious and secular school providers as competitors for parents’ attention, and shows how inequalities shape parents’ interest in and access to secular/religious schools. Kitching particularly explores how children in urban and rural settings negotiate the joys, pleasures, paradoxes and injustices of schooling and childhood. It outlines ways in which children’s social position, relationships and encounters with religious and consumer objects inform who they can become, and who and what they value. Drawing on the above research, Childhood, Religion and School Injustice demonstrates the need to engage with each child’s plurality, and to recognise multiple inequalities experienced by families across schools. Given the tendency towards mass school privatisation, Kitching argues for the context-specific becoming public of school systems and localities, where majoritarian, narrow self-interest is challenged, unchosen obligations to others are recognised, and collective imaginings of what a ‘good’ childhood is, are publicly engaged.
