Dealing with Diversity in Education: A Critical View on Goals and Outcomes

Abstract

Education within the context of diversity, which in most societies includes multicultural and multilingual groups, is inevitably concerned with constant comparisons of life-worlds and lifestyles, defined in ethno-cultural as well as other terms. Yet educators and scholars who aim to pursue a career in teaching and research often experience at first hand the traditional, obsolete arguments of those who adhere to the myth of an alleged cultural purity and who idealize the superiority of mono-cultural and mono-lingual socialization, often without reflecting about the necessity to overcome social inequality. To many, in both the private and the public sphere, diversity still does not appear as “one of the spices of life” (Segall et al., 1999, p. 323). Nor, as Robert Putnam (2007) maintains, do the objective advantages of the diversity brought in by migration always appear immediately — they do so in the long run. In fact, the core concern of any researcher in education who sees diversity as the natural state of societies is to deconstruct arbitrary norms and stereotypes about social, ethnic and otherwise defined homogeneity.