observance or meditation periods within both religious and nonreligious state-funded schools. Both are relevant to this paper’s later discussion of religion in Scottish schools. In their broad debate, Audi and Wolterstorff give consideration to both issues within the context of the fundamentals of liberal and multiculturalist thought, respectively. To distinguish between the two schools of thought, Wolterstorff denotes (and Audi endorses) two separate conceptions of state neutrality with regard to the establishment of religion: the separation and impartiality interpretations.3 By providing a framework against which to compare secular and religious policies, these interpretations allow more vigorous analysis of the modern Scottish religious education policies and therefore require further elucidation.
I.I State-Funded Religious Schools
VVParticularly with regard to public funding of religious schools, Wolterstorff defines the separation interpretation as holding “that the state is to aid no school whose orientation is religious,” while the impartiality interpretation demands that “if the state aids any schools, it must aid all schools, and aid them all equitably—no matter what their religious orientation, if any.”4 Wolterstorff embraces the latter, arguing that the separation interpretation would demand that the state fund no religious schools, thereby economically discriminating against parents who are legally banned neither from creating nor from sending their children to religious schools, but must pay more to do so. Such an arrangement, according to Wolterstorff, impinges on these parents’ right to freely exercise their religion, and so he determines impartiality to be the more desirable conception of state neutrality.5
8883. Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square, (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997),
122.
8884. Audi and Wolterstorff, 76.
8885. Ibid, 116.
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