CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND EDUCATION: WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE 60 YEARS AGO?
1948: the American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, emphasises the role of culture in 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 in [a] Civilized World, in 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, in 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 in all societies invent for themselves and transmit down the generations have in 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 in 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
Para Ruth Benedict, a Cultura é um processo de aprendizagem em que
