This demonstrates that, when analysing approaches to moral education, the first question that we should ask is whether it is possible to provide moral education that does not include attention to broad moral views and therefore avoids influencing the personal worldview of students.

When we investigate the Peaceable School programme further, we find that there are certain ontological views underlying the programme. Ontological views focus on the nature of a human being: What is a human being? Is human nature good or bad? (see for example Walsh & Middleton, 1984; Sandsmark, 2000, p. 6). A subcategory of ontological views consists of the anthropological views we encounter in the Peaceable School, for example that human beings are social beings. Any programme that provides moral, social and citizenship education will be developed from certain viewpoints regarding the purpose of human beings, how they should act and their role in the world. The aim of these programmes is to motivate students to act upon these beliefs.

When examined more closely, existential views do not only underlie the programme of the Peaceable School but they are also taught to pupils: norms and values regarding existential matters, for instance the view about the good nature of human beings or about the idea that human beings are not in the world for themselves only, are part of the programme. This shows that we also have to ask another question with respect to approaches to moral education, namely whether they aim to influence the personal worldview matters that lie outside the broad moral domain.

In the introduction we stated that discussions focus mainly on the position of what we call religious and non-religious organised worldviews in public education. The Peaceable School does not aim to transmit certain theological beliefs or views that are specifically religious or specifically related to a non-religious organised worldview. However, as a consequence of the programme aiming at self-reflection and self-confidence, students can be stimulated to reflect on and even reconsider their own (theological) organised worldview beliefs. This demonstrates that two extra distinctions might be helpful in answering our main question more precisely, namely intentional versus non-intentional teaching and directive versus nondirective teaching.

If an approach to moral education seems to have consequences for the theol gical convictions of students and their organised worldviews, we can examine whether this influence is an intentional aim of the programme or approach, or a non-intentional side effect (Brezinka, 1994) and whether attention is paid to religious and non-religious organised worldview convictions in a directive or nondirective manner (Hand, 2008).

An educational activity has a certain educational aim. The result of the activity can be what was intended, it can be something different or there can be no learning outcome whatsoever. When the outcome of an educational activity is different from the aim that was set, we speak of non-intentional learning (Brezinka, 1994). This often happens in education. Students can learn something from a teacher even though he or she is not trying to teach it, for example, when students learn a new word from a teacher that he or she merely used to explain something else.5 In the case of personal worldview development, it is possible to imagine that an approach to moral education has the non-intentional result that students think critically about their personal worldview, as we saw in the Peaceable School example. Since this is a non-intentional consequence that could also happen in subjects other than moral education, we believe that this is not contrary to the aim of public education as it is still in accord with the aim of public education not to ransmit specific religious or non-religious worldviews. However, when a moral education programme or approach does intentionally aim to influence the religious or non-religious worldview convictions of students, the question should be asked whether this is appropriate for public education.