In recent years, there have been reports about increased religious discrimination in schools. As a way of acknowledging the importance of religion and faith communities in the public sphere and propose a solution to the exclusion of religious citizens, the political philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, suggests an act of translation for which both secular and religious citizens are mutually responsible. What gets lost in Habermas’s translation however, this paper argues, is the condition which makes translation both necessary and (im)possible. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the untranslatable and the task of the translator, the paper approaches translation as a process of dislocation and uncertainty, an approach which challenges any easy distinction between the secular and the religious as well as the possibility of mutual responsibility. Following Derrida, the aim of the paper is to explore some ethical implications of the untranslatable in relation to religious difference in education. It argues that translation is a human condition but that there is an ethical ambivalence at play that needs to be acknowledged if students with religious convictions are not to be further violated in schools.

The aim of the paper is to philosophically explore some ethical implications of the untranslatable in relation to religious difference in education.