Muslim Minors: Freedom of Religion, Education and Policies for Social Integration

Any analysis of social integration policies cannot ignore a preliminary reflection on today's multicultural society and on the role that religion plays within it. In particular, the investigation of the social inclusion policies of Muslim minors is closely linked to the theme of religious freedom, within a web of cultural and educational choices. Therefore, in the educational process of the protagonists of the future, school covers a leading role. Between parents and schools, a special synergy is or should be established in order to ensure that minors receive education and training that respect the confession to which they belong or the spiritual orientation of their families, at the same time able to guarantee the self-determination of minors from the perspective of their best interests, as established by the Convention on the Rights of the Child signed in New York in 1989. The paper sets out to demonstrate that schools themselves must offer concrete recognition and effective protection of the right to religious freedom of minors, in the sense of putting the best interests of the child first, and that this can be effectively pursued through an intercultural education project. In the global world, intercultural education, understood as a path to be taken together, as a process of common growth in which everyone gives up something in the name of affirming shared values, is an important and, indeed, essential tool for the implementation of inclusion policies.