CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND EDUCATION: WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE 60 YEARS AGO?
1948: the American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, emphasises the role of culture ∈ education and international cooperation.
2008: the French anthropologist, Cécile Duvelle, takes stock - the idea has filtered into our thinking, but is still struggling to be turned into practice.
In 1948, the American social anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, published her article Cultural Continuity ∈[a]Civilized World, ∈ one of the first issues of the UNESCO Courier. I read it with mixed feelings. On the one hand it was disconcerting to be reading a message that seemed so relevant today, while, 60 years on, UNESCO seems to have made only quite modest progress. I felt a certain enthusiasm, too, for the rightness of her thinking, and the impression that UNESCO, ∈ its long career, has never really departed from its primary objective. Ruth Benedict‟s observation seems self-evident: culture is a learning process. “The cultural patterns which men ∈ all societies invent for themselves and transmit down the generations have ∈ each community a considerable degree of consistency within themselves […] and have to be taught anew to each generation,” she wrote, before adding that rec ognition of “cultural differences” – a term that, a few decades later was replaced by „cultural diversity‟ – “can promote international co-operation” and cannot be blamed for “the chaos of the world”, as some would have us believe, even today. […] Sixty years later, have we succeeded ∈ guaranteeing a quality education for all, which respects cultural diversity and serves as a lever for sustainable development, conceived and promoted by the people themselves?
Disponível em: http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php−URLID=43982&URLDO=DOTOPIC&URLSECTION=201.html. Acesso em 02 jul. 2010. [Adaptado
O Correio da UNESCO publicou o texto de Ruth Benedict
