Can law avoid creating culture and religion in its own image? The context for diversity, religion and culture in MEC for Education: KwaZulu-Natal and Others v Navaneethum Pillay: Reflections a decade later
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reviews the important MEC for Education: KwaZulu-Natal and Others v Navaneethum Pillay decision, handed down by the Constitutional Court of South Africa, against reflectionsregarding law and religion in the ten years since that decision was delivered. It places the decision in relation to scholarly debates about the nature of a diverse society and, in particular, how certainstrands of what pass for “liberal” theory do not, in fact, provide for respect for diversity and difference. In particular, the article reviews various ways in which moves towards homogeneity may employ the language of diversity to achieve their ends against the goals of the South African Constitution, which, properly understood, should maximize genuine diversity and accommodation. The article also discusses briefly the recent decision of Organisasie vir Godsdiens Onderrig en Demokrasie v Randhart et al., which interprets sec. 15(2) of the Constitution as allowing religious observances in public schools as long as such observances are not exclusive and exclusionary. The article supports this interpretation and suggests that the goals sought by the applicant in Organisasie vir Godsdiens Onderrig en Demokrasie v Randhart et al. exemplified the kind of “convergence” and “civic totalism”. Also discussed is whether other listed constitutional terms such as ‘culture’, ‘belief’ and ‘conscience’ should attract the same kind of protections as ‘religion’ and whether there is a risk that, by categorizing the protection of other concepts too broadly, important aspects of religion (for example, that it is not simply an individual, but a communitarian right) might be trivialized. Finally, the article reviews certain developments in other countries (France and Canada) to suggest that how the State is understood in the context of accommodation will vary in relation to how the terms ‘secular’ and ‘diversity’ are defined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".