Pillarisation and the Funding of Religious Schools

The most durable legacy of the pillarised era is Article 23 of the Dutch constitution, which guarantees freedom of education and requires the state to fund private schools on the same footing as public ones. It was the settlement of the school struggle, a political conflict that ran from the 1870s to 1917 and was resolved by giving confessional parties the funding they wanted in exchange for universal male suffrage and proportional representation. The effect is that a substantial majority of Dutch pupils attend schools that are formally Catholic, Protestant, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish or humanist, all paid for out of taxation, in a country where most people no longer practise any religion. That combination now produces the sharpest arguments in Dutch religious policy.

Schools founded on a religious basis may set an admissions and staffing policy consistent with that basis, which sits awkwardly against equal treatment law, and the small number of Islamic schools has attracted inspection and funding disputes disproportionate to its size. Attempts to amend Article 23 have failed repeatedly because amendment requires a two thirds majority in both chambers after an intervening election. The other continuing dispute concerns ritual slaughter without prior stunning: a bill to ban it passed the lower house in 2011, was rejected by the senate, and was replaced by a covenant setting conditions instead.