Bill 21 as an exemplar of the fragility of tolerance

ABSTRACT

In June 2019, Québec passed Bill 21, entitled: ‘An Act respecting the laicity of the State’. This bill bans public servants from wearing religious symbols in the workplace. Among the affected employees are judges, teachers, and government officers. This paper considers the ethical ramifications of Bill 21 on education. Particularly, this paper examines some prime arguments for and against abridging religious rights for teachers and public servants. Then, the paper explicates the immanent tension between the desire to advance tolerance and the exercise of intolerant practices against minorities. In this sense, the case of Bill 21 exemplifies the fragility of tolerance. Drawing from Dewey’s pragmatic understanding and agonistic models of democracy, the concluding section of this paper argues for the development of a more inclusive understanding of tolerance that will offer students educational experience and encourage them to constantly consider their predispositions and biases towards the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Tolerance
• democracy and education
• citizenship education
• agonism
• political emotions
• pragmatism
• secularism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the paper focuses on Bill 21, which reflects a longstanding cultural tension in Québec, the theoretical analysis aims to consider a broader understating of the fragility of tolerance, and the need to consider conceptual frameworks that will better support the cultivation of tolerance in educational settings.

2 It is important to point out that agonism is a component of a number of political theories, which will not be able to be captured in this paper. In general, agonism has been evolved into two distinct directions: associative and dissociative agonism. This paper follows the rationality of dissociative agonism, which recognizes the division of ‘us and them’ as part of human relations (Mouffe, 2013; Ruitenberg, 2009).