Education, Diversity and Inclusion: Intercultural Education in Perspective

Abstract

Education is a human process and a social fact. The debate is based on the concepts that conceive education as: transmission, aimed at reproducing reality from a fragmented and static perspective; transformation. This perspective recognizes transmission, but also defines it as a necessary practice for social change. These notions establish education as a communicative process, which involves social relations between subjects in diverse contexts, under situations of exchange and reciprocal modifications, where conflict arises. Education as a task of the State is constituted under a particular vision of reality with determined objectives that do not always offer answers to the needs and expectations of subjects and social groups in multicultural contexts. In this dimension, education and the school institution become the locus of dispute. Social policies for inclusion place the school institution as one of the spaces to manage the differences associated with sociocultural diversity. The school makes cultural diversity visible and then disables it, through its incorporation into the discourse of intercultural protocols. Cultural policies recognize exclusion, as well as rights against racism, discrimination and social exclusion, through affirmative action to combat poverty. The challenge is to generate appropriate devices and strategies to address diversity and manage new forms of coexistence with a future horizon towards intercultural relations in an inclusive society.