I returned last week from the 30th Anniversary Conference on Philosophy for Children in Mendham, New Jersey. Since philosophy for children has become an international movement, with significant activity in 40 countries, the conference was an international gathering, in which native English speakers were the dominant group but not quite a majority. I was surprised at how valuable an international gathering can be. There are strains, of course. For the U.S. delegation: trying to hear the different versions of English and trying to communicate in a style clear enough to be readily understood by non-native speakers. For visitors: all the problems of being away from home, adjusting to a different cultural set, taking risks in a strange language. But the value outweighed the problems. It is so obviously valuable to work with people who assume what one would never even entertain, who have as part of their basic intellectual canon books one has never read, whose natural style is unfamiliar. Such an environment forces one to rethink many things that would just pass in a more uniform cultural setting, to put reasons behind stuff that has never before needed reasons. A genuine multi-cultural setting, in which all participants expect and are given respect and attention and equal standing, is about as good a stimulus for intelligence as can be imagined.
I think that discussions of multi-culturalism in education should take better account of one simple fact: for lots of what we do, multi-cultural education will automatically be critical and imaginative and open to alternatives. All these "higher order" features we try to build into teaching are present automatically as soon as one brings together a group with enough diversity and a sense of dignity.
Posted by shea0017 at November 19, 2004 12:56 PM