Education – An Intercultural Mission

Christoph Wulf

In view of globalisation and Europeanisation, education today is more than ever an intercultural mission. In going beyond the boundaries of local culture, education has to combine the perspectives of cultural diversity with the perspectives of globalisation.

The present transformation of society known as globalisation is a multidimensional process with economic, political, social and cultural consequences, which is changing the relationships between local, regional, national and global levels. Even though increasing globalisation is influencing the lives of many people today, movements that emphasise cultural diversity are no less important and they often come into conflict with globalisation. In this context, efforts to implement the right to cultural diversity have recently been intensified at the international level.¹

”The Other” in Child-Raising and Education

There are three reasons why the European systems of child-raising and education have often found it so difficult to open up to and come to terms with the alterity of other people and cultures in the course of history: European egocentrism, logocentrism and ethnocentrism – and the associated psychological, epistemological and cultural reductions that make it difficult to understand “the other”. In the process of violence-free rapprochement, the important thing is to avoid ontologising alterity and turning it into a concretised object. Instead, alterity has to be perceived as a relation which is formed in the process of encountering people from other cultures in different historical and cultural contexts.
The dynamics of globalisation, which are permeating more and more areas of life, are making it more difficult to encounter “the other” as someone who is different and foreign and in this sense has a constitutive function for the individual and the community.

The increasing intransparency of the world is causing a growing insecurity in individuals who have to tolerate the difference between themselves and “others”. In this situation, uncertainty and insecurity are becoming central characteristics of life in society. Their source lies partly in the world outside the individual and partly inside the individual – and ultimately, in the interaction between inside and outside. In view of this situation, there has been no lack of attempts to make this insecurity tolerable by focusing on apparent certainties.
But these so-called certainties do not help people to recover their lost sense of security. Their validity is relative and usually arises through the exclusion of alternatives. What is excluded is determined, on the one hand, by the psychological and social constitution of the individual, and on the other hand by societal power structures and the resulting processes of setting and excluding values, norms, ideologies and discourses.

Dr. Christoph Wulf is Professor of General and Comparative Education at the Freie Universität Berlin and Vice-President of the German UNESCO Commission. His work focuses primarily on pedagogical anthropology, aesthetic and intercultural education, and emotion research.

¹On 20 October 2005, the UNESCO General Conference adopted the “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions”. In 2008 the Council of Europe adopted the White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue entitled “Living Together as Equals in Dignity”.