The intensification of radical and extremist thinking has become an international cause of concern and the fear related to terrorism has increased worldwide. Early 21st century public discourses have been correspondingly marked by hate speech and ideological propaganda spread from a variety of perspectives through the intensified presence of global social media networks. In many countries, governments have reacted to these perceived and actual threats by drafting policies and preventive programs and legal-security interventions to tackle radicalization, terrorism itself, as well as ideological extremism. Many of the current strategies point to the critical role of societal education. As a result, educational institutions have gained growing importance as platforms for different kinds of prevention protocols or counter-terrorism strategies. However, notably less attention has been paid on the consistencies of values between the aims of the educational strategies for preventing or countering ideological extremism and the core functions of education in fostering individual and societal well-being and growth. Using Finnish education as a case, this paper discusses the challenges and possibilities related to educational institutions as spaces for preventing violent extremism, with special regard to the religious and nationalistic ideologies that divert from those inherent in the national hegemony. This study highlights the need to plan counter-terrorism strategies in line with national educational policies through what we conceptualize as ‘institutional habitus’.

Initiatives for preventing radicalization and violent extremism through education (PVE-E) have become a feature of global educational policy and educational institutions across all phases, from early childhood to universities, also in Finland. If schools may be regarded as safe spaces here for identity and worldview construction and experiences of belonging, the specific subject matter of PVE-E is also dangerous territory. Not least because of PVE-E’s focus on radicalization, but above all because of perceptions of schools being used as an adjunct of governmental counter-terrorism policy. We argue that understanding young people’s views on issues related to radicalization and violent extremism is critical in order to develop ethical, sustainable, contextualized, and pedagogical approaches to prevent hostilities and foster peaceful co-existence. After providing some critical framing of the Finnish educational context in a broader international setting, we thus examine young people’s views (n = 3617) in relation to the safe spaces through online survey data gathered as a part of our larger 4-year research project Growing up radical? The role of educational institutions in guiding young people’s worldview construction. Specifically focused on Finland but with potentially wider international implications, more understanding about the topic of PVE-E is needed to inform teacher education and training, to which our empirical data makes some innovative contribution.

This article introduces the concept of ‘threshold of adversity’ as an, at present, tentative means of understanding the turning points to radicalization and extremism within educational systems. The conceptual frame is, we argue, of pedagogical and policy relevance across and beyond Nordic countries. Across Nordic countries, the main objective for the prevention of radicalization and extremism through education (PVE-E) is to strengthen the students’ resilience against ideological influences. Given the specialist complexities of the interdisciplinary research literature on terrorism, from which much PVE-E derives, for teachers and policy-makers, understanding the theoretical contexts, which underlie such policy innovations and their pedagogical implementation, are, understandably, problematic. To discuss extremism and the possibilities of its prevention especially in the education sector, an understanding of what exactly is being prevented or fought against is needed. Our conceptual ‘threshold of adversity’ model offers at least a starting point for a more practicable pedagogical implementation.

Decolonising the religious education curriculum Religion and education at the epicentre of empires Since the fifteenth century until the era of decolonisation in the twentieth, religion and education were at the epicentre of all European Empires. That is, wherever Christian missionary activity met economic and expansion into the 'New Worlds'-of North and South America-or the continent of Africa, across Asia, in Australia, across the South Sea, throughout Oceania (Hastings 1999). Physical journeys of exploration to 'new' lands would open up opportunities for the expansion of power. Competition for commerce was the mainstay of European power for centuries, but the cultural expansion of European ideas on civilisation were the bedrock of its success. Mere military conquest and economic exploitation could never have been sufficient for the maintenance of colonies across the world, which would last not merely decades but centuries. One of the critical components of this cultural expansion was the spread of Christianity, initially of Catholic and then, in the wake of the Reformation, Protestant. These colonial histories were complex and long-lasting. The nuances of each stage of settlement is far beyond a single article or editorial. There is one critical strain of educational and theological logic in this history of colonialism and imperialism, one that is and remains integral to history of conversion. Even if here there are considerable differences between the emphasis of Catholic and Protestant missionary activity-Spanish and Portuguese Catholic efforts at inculturation of local traditions across Central and South America, for instance-that differ greatly from the emphasis on Biblical literacy, particularly that of the King James Bible, in the Protestant missionary work of the British Empire in all quarters of the globe (Chidester 2014; Gearon 2013; Ngũgĩ 1986). If anything, Protestant missionary work which went hand in hand with the expansion of British Empire, gives the strongest of all exemplar of this educational and theological logic, one which links culture and colonialism. As Gearon (2013), has noted, in the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, if God's revelation was known through his Word, reading God's Word became critical to salvation, even if such reading was in itself of course no guarantee of salvation. Here, a theology of sola scriptura contributed not only literacy in Great Britain but ensured that literacy in English reading and writing went hand-in-glove with the adjunct of missionary activity across the British Empire (Bragg 2011; Nicholson 2011). Nicholson's (2011) book on the King James Bible is not for no reason titled, When God Spoke English. The English language legacy, albeit contested, remains in the postcolonial or neo-colonial present. Despite this integral connection between religion and education in the history of colonialism, with some notable exceptions from nearly two decades ago (Gearon 2001a, 2001b, 2002), religious education, as a school subject, has little reflected on the role ...

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