Multicultural Societies and Modes of Integration: Dilemmas of Public Education

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Multicultural Societies and Modes of Integration: Dilemmas of Public Education

The drawing that accompanies this text was made by a 12 year-old Albanian boy who had immigrated to Greece a year ago.[1] Children’s drawings always have a projective quality and especially those depicting human figures provide signs of their attitudes towards life’s stresses and strains, reflect fears and anxieties that concern them consciously or unconsciously (Koppitz, 1969). The drawing in question is a stick-figure lacking in all detail with the exception of tears pouring from its eyes and the word xenohoria ( ξενοχόρια ) written above it. There is no such word as xenohoria . It is either a slip of the tongue or the boy constructed, knowingly or not, a new compound word made up of stenahoria ( στεναχώρια ) meaning “sadness”, and xenos meaning “stranger”. Although in the analysis of children’s drawings stick-figures are usually a sign of avoidance (ibid:106) the young boy’s drawing is eloquently revealing of his deep sorrow being a stranger in a foreign land.

The big challenge ahead for the young boy is negotiation of membership in his new community and the educational system will greatly determine how successful this negotiation will be. As a rule, when schools fail to understand and take into consideration their students’ culture, language, religion, ethnicity and race, the result is often underachievement, cultural oppression and devaluation of identity. If this is the case with the boy’s educational career his sorrow may well become internalized and gravely damage his self-worth and sense of identity. Cummins refers to a study in a multicultural school in California revealing the intense despair of students, epitomized by the words: “This place makes my heart ache” (Cummins, 1996).

At a time when the Greek society is grappling with the difficult issue of immigration and ethnic relations, and when many are looking to education as a vehicle of challenging inequality and exclusion, it is important to look into integration policy applications and how they are reflected in educational policies and school practices.

Whereas European Union excludes any interference with the member states’ laws and regulations governing the educational system, it has stressed the role of education in advancing intercultural dialogue, in combating xenophobia, in respecting cultural diversity and in promoting tolerance.The Report on “Education and Training” produced in 2010, jointly by the Council and the Commission, emphasizes the development of “cultural awareness and expression” as a major key competence, [2] while the “Europe 2020” strategy explicitly calls for compensatory measures which can make a difference for migrant children such as updated curricula, improved teacher education, innovative teaching methods, individualized support and stronger cooperation with families and the local community.[3] Similar was the approach of the 2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue calling for “cultural awareness” and development of “intercultural competence”.[4]

However, the above lofty ideals, promoted by the European Union, are bound to remain a dead letter if, first, some hard questions do not get answered. Critical voices from within the field of intercultural education are increasingly questioning whether invocations to diversity and tolerance do not just serve a depoliticized version of intercultural education that ends up to sustain, rather than demolish, inequities (Díaz-Rico, 1998; Gorski, 2006). Similarly, Cummins (2004:34) calls for a shift of intercultural education to a sociological and sociopolitical orientation and questions the extent to which structures like the content of curriculum, assessment practices and language of instruction, contribute to perpetuating discrimination and underachievement of minority students. Or further, whether we can see classroom instruction as ‘neutral’ with respect to relations of status and power in the wider society. What messages are being communicated to students, wonders Cummins, when we ‘just teach the curriculum’ as compared to teaching the curriculum in a way that students’ cultural and linguistic identities are affirmed?

Communal diversity

Cultural diversity and politics of recognition can take various forms in contemporary societies. The present paper focuses only on communal diversity concerning either newly arrived immigrants or long-established territorial cultural groups. The first have left their national community to enter another society, while, the latter constitute distinct and potentially self-governing societies incorporated into a larger state. The term Walzer (1982) has coined to describe the difference between the two, is ‘New World’ and ‘Old World’ diversity. Regardless of their differences, both groups constitute minorities in terms of representing a sizeable collectivity or community of people who have shared, over a substantial period of time, a distinctive cultural identity differing from that of the majority. The sense of belonging among members of any such minority group stems from sharing one or more distinctive characteristics such as a common history, language, religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, or a set of cultural traditions that define their identity in both their own and other people’s eyes (Halstead, 2003). Both immigrants and/or territorial minorities render societies multicultural in their composition.

Societies that they had long assumed they were culturally homogeneous, such is the Greek one, when they find themselves faced with distinct cultural groups does not necessarily imply that they become multiculturalist in their orientation. Whereas it was assumed that all their citizens automatically would assimilate into a single national culture, they realize that this is not the case anymore and are faced with new and unfamiliar, multiculturalist challenges. Parekh (2000) points out the frequent failure of distinguishing between the terms ‘multicultural’, referring to the fact of cultural diversity, and ‘multiculturalism’, referring to a normative response to the fact. At the end of the day, a multiculturalist approach is not about minorities; it is equally about the majority culture and the relationship between the different cultural communities.

Every multicultural society faces two conflicting demands and has to develop an educational structure that would reconcile them in a just manner. On the one hand, society must create a sense of group membership in order to act as a united community and apply collectively binding decisions. If we think along Benedict Anderson’s terms, it is this sense of collective identity that enables us to transcend our mortality by linking us to something that extends back into time immemorial, and forward into the indefinite future (Anderson, 1983). On the other hand, most people have a deep bond to their own culture, and, society must accommodate demands for diversity. Paradoxically says Parekh (2000), the greater the diversity in a society, the greater the unity and cohesion is required in order to hold itself together and nurture its diversity. Respect of one’s culture, acknowledgment and acceptance by others, generate confidence, social recognition and contribute towards identity consolidation—all being processes prerequisite for intercultural interaction. Social psychologists have pointed out that group identification is a multidimensional construct and have shown that national, ethnic and religious identities can be negotiated as to not, de facto , compete (Chryssochoou et al., 2011).

Minority demands and state integration policies

Types of group-differentiated demands

Multiculturalism is a coin with two sides. One side concerns the specific integration policy adopted by the state, and the other, the expectations and the demands made by the minorities themselves. Demands raised by minorities will be discussed first and state integration policies will follow. Here the term “minority” can obfuscate divergence in demands, i.e. while immigrant groups may reject assimilation, asserting their right to express their ethnic particularity, national/autochthonous minorities may demand to set up a parallel society. Kymlica (1995) suggests a threefold typology of the demands raised by minorities. (a) National minorities may demand transfer of political power as regards self-government rights. Such demands are very rarely satisfied and thus remain in a utopian sphere. (b) Both ethnic and national minorities may challenge the right to freely express their particularity without fear of prejudice or discrimination in the mainstream society. Claims for changes in the education curriculum recognizing the history and contribution of minorities, public funding of cultural practices, or affirmative action programs would fall in this category of demands. The basic difference with government rights is that such poly-ethnic claims contribute towards integration into the larger society, rather than breaking away. (c) Both ethnic and national minorities may demand special representation rights aiming to highlight the diversity of population that is under-represented. Such demands would be satisfied if political parties were to be more inclusive. Kymlica asserts that the cultural claims, falling in the above categories, have different moral weights—national minorities have the strongest and economic immigrants the weakest.

As interesting as Kymilca’s typology may be, it is the product of a normative analytic framework assuming that the nature of culture and the nature of groups fall into categorical distinctions, thus invalidating the aim of relevance to real world dilemmas and challenges (May et al., 2004). Besides, it fails to take into consideration that minority groups very often lack the power and the resources to promote their cause. They face unwillingness on the part of the dominant group to change existing structures and make room for cultural diversity. Dominant groups either display overt or covert cultural superiority leading to various forms of discrimination or adopt a paternalistic and condescending stance. In addition, they have established interests and hold strongly onto them, often resisting compensatory programs or affirmative action. Most minority groups are likely to spend most of their lives within their own group, suffering political, economic and cultural disadvantage.

In addition, there is further differentiation of expectations and demands within the immigrant groups themselves. Minority groups are not of one kind. National, ethnic, religious and class identities are not of an equivalent nature and do not have similar political and social psychological consequences. To take the Greek example, economic immigrants who have brought their families in Greece adopt different adaptation strategies from those who have not, and their expectations vary (Triandafyllidou & Kokkali, 2010). Albanians aspire to settle and fit in the Greek society as a family; they play down differences and resort to assimilatory practices that silence their otherness, such as name changing and christening of children. Georgians are mainly women, are Christian Orthodox and many follow Greek Orthodox churches on Sunday. Muslim Southeast Asians immigrants (Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Afghani), on the other hand, are mostly male, have cultural roots outside the Western world, and are anxious to maintain the character of their religious beliefs, values and traditions; hence they pose challenges to Greek society, as is the construction of an official mosque in Athens.

State integration policies

The communitarian-liberal divide

The above typology of claims made by minority groups upon the state, structures the debate of cultural rights within political and social theory.

In contemporary Western multicultural societies, diversity is managed on the basis of what has come to be termed, in an ideal type sense, the communitarian-liberal divide. Political liberalism prioritizes the equality of all individuals before the law and is premised on the autonomy of the individual. Free and equal persons, and society as a system of voluntary cooperation between them, are central to the political culture of democratic societies (Rawls, 1993; Dworkin, 1997). Political liberalism is preoccupied with a homogeneous legal and political structure and does not conceive of identities as porous. While it is sensitive to moral plurality, it pays little attention to cultural diversity, the politics of recognition and difference, and more generally to the nature and importance of culture. Ethnic identities are not recognized within the public sphere. In the liberal model, one’s cultural, ethnic, religious or racial identities are private matters. “People”, according to Rawls, “are born and are expected to lead a complete life” within the same “society and culture”, and this defines the scope within which people must be free and equal” (Rawls, 1993:277).

In sum, according to the liberal ideal the role of the state is to ensure that every citizen is treated as an equal member of society with the same rights and responsibilities. The aim is to ensure that all citizens’ rights are protected and that members of minority groups do not suffer from discrimination. Yet this approach disregards issues of power, domination and historical oppression of political and private lives and ignores the lack of opportunities for real participation and choice. How can it be made certain that minorities will not be subject to the tyranny of the majority? Besides, the significance of the private sphere is undermined. According to Mouffe (1990), who is critical of the Rawlsian position, the sphere of privacy is implicitly defined in such a way as to be incapable of endangering the institutions that embody the political principles of equality and liberty.

The communitarian approach, argues that a broader communal socialization in a historically rooted culture is necessary to enable the individualism professed by the liberalists (Taylor, 1994). Charles Taylor (1991) talks about “deep diversity” since it is not only diversity of cultural groups that needs to be accommodated, but also a diversity of ways in which the members of these groups belong to the larger polity. For communitarians, there can be no question of a ‘difference-blind liberalism’ withholding value judgments on matters of cultural difference. Taylor proposes what he terms ‘politics of equal respect’ for different cultures. However, critics of Taylor purport that there is an underlying presumption of equal worth as a starting point for dialogue with the cultural ‘other’. This raises the question as to how the un- or misrecognized groups can secure recognition and engage in such a dialogue at an equal footing. And here is where Taylor’s analysis falters, claims Parekh (2000).

The liberal-communitarian dispute evolved in the early 1990s into a discussion about non-western traditions in relation to liberal western values and to a more focused debate about how to contain minority demands (Kymlica, 1999). Kymlica develops the Rawlsian theory of justice into a theory of multiculturalism by contending that minorities and majority should enjoy equal cultural rights and be able to exercise them equally effectively. He argues that enforced assimilation never works neither on the psychological nor on the moral level. Still non-liberals are not convinced by Kymlica’s defense of basic liberal principles. They complain of moral intolerance when asked to live by them, claim that his assumptions value culture but not cultural diversity and do not find in his propositions a theoretically satisfactory alternative (Parekh, 2000).

Young, in her critique of the Rawlsian liberal approach, has challenged the most important failing of mainstream liberal thinking, that is, the effect of power, domination and historical oppression on individual and collective lives, the substantive inequalities on minorities’ ability to choose and their chance for real participation (Young, 1990). Yet, despite the fact she talks about politics of difference, she has also been charged as remaining bound by Western liberal thinking, having failed, for example, to include religion as a significant category (May et al., 2004).

Both communitarian and liberal approaches have their own inherent limitations.

The liberal position, while it has a moral standing and offers a powerful tool in western society, may leave unnoticeable structural aspects of exclusion, enduring injustice and social constraints, difficult for the oppressed to overcome even if they are equal in front of the law. This model does not empower marginalized groups, as often are national minorities, and, almost always, economic immigrants. Social injustices are merely rendered invisible.

From the communitarian point of view, in order for minorities to be treated fairly, the state should accommodate diversity, by giving effective control to minority groups over certain political and cultural affairs. It is the institutionalization of collective rights that can provide guarantees against majoritarian oppression. This approach may protect specific collective rights for a minority, but runs the risk of segregation, of building boundaries between the majority and the minorities, and of paying lip service to inequalities of power within the minorities themselves.

Politics of ethnicity

Approaching multiculturalism through politics of ethnicity is a way to go beyond the limitations of the liberal-communitarian divide (Hall, 1992). Identity and culture are the two building blocks of ethnicity. The construction of ethnic identity and culture is the result of both structure and agency. It is a dialectic played out by ethnic groups and the larger society (Nagel, 1994). Constructionist accounts of identities point to their fluidity, to the non-unitary character of social groups and to the need of understanding culture as an interactive process rather than a set of unchanging, fixed traits. Conceiving ethnicity as a social and cultural construction, its articulation with other social forces can be explored. This way, ethnicities are embedded in social relationships and acquire the meaning individuals or groups decide, in any given circumstance, to attribute to them. The recognition that actors speak from a particular place, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, a particular history renders ethnicities fluid and malleable, subject to continuous negotiation. “A chosen ethnic identity”, says Nagel, “is determined by the individual’s perception of its meaning to different audiences, its salience in different contexts, and its utility in different settings” (ibid:155).

Both liberal and communitarian approaches are top down. It is the state that decides and distributes rights accordingly. The challenge, according to Bhabha is to deal not with ‘them’ or ‘us’ but with the historically and temporally disjunct positions that minorities occupy ambivalently within the nation’s space (Bhabha, 2001). Bhabha talks about a partial culture, defining it as the connective tissue between cultures pointing to the impossibility of culture’s containedness and the boundary between. His social subject is constituted through cultural hybridization. The hybrid strategy opens up a space of negotiation where power is unequal but its articulation refuses a binary representation of social antagonism. It makes possible the emergence of an ‘in-between’ agency. “Hybrid agencies”, according to Bhabha, “find their voices in a dialectic that does not ask for cultural supremacy or sovereignty. They deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy: the outside of the inside, the part in the whole” (2001:34).

In sum, politics of ethnicity in this paper are understood as fluid and open-ended processes of negotiation and contestation rather than fixed representation and recognition of specific categories. Identities are treated as a dynamic and shifting nexus of multiple subject positions and space is provided, whereby identity options can be negotiated and renegotiated. The focus is on the centrality of dialogic interaction between cultures, between the oppressed and the oppressor, towards cooperation and shared goal setting. Commitment to dialoging implies a willingness of accepting certain modes of deliberation and democratic procedures within conditions of political antagonism and inequity, and the desire and intention to arrive at a consensus that will be open to a new process of negotiation.

Education is a par excellence context where dialectic skills can be practiced, where voice can be given to the child, to his/her parents and the community.

Dilemmas of public education

Culturally derived differences are always embedded in a shared and historically inherited system of meaning and significance. Hence, since education is a par excellence mechanism for the consolidation and reproduction of these shared historical meanings, there is tension between what is taught in the school and the nature of the populations in the various states. Consequently, intercultural education is a highly political and politicized field, both for natives and migrants, minorities and majorities alike.

Liberalism in education

Education is a preferential field of the debates on ethnicity and minority rights.

Liberalism has had a profound impact on the way in which society views the role of state controlled education. Rawls (1972) argues for a liberal education justified by the benefits it provides to the least advantaged students. Liberals maintain that the state should maintain, at the very least, regulatory authority over educational policy. The school system guarantees national unity through the principles of a free compulsory, secular schooling. Such is the kind of education promoted by the universalistic and egalitarian French school system that has played an important role in the assimilation of generations of immigrant children.

From the point of view of liberal political principle, education is a preparation for autonomy. An autonomous individual is one who can distance herself/himself sufficiently from her/his parents’ and community ‘s values and can self-consciously select, rather than accept, the principles that govern her/his life. Liberalism speaks of respecting the self-chosen projects of others, and of allowing them to pursue them in the light of their own values. Preparing a child to become autonomous requires that the school give her/him access to values and to knowledge. Yet educating children for autonomy requires preparing them for relationships, not just preparing them to respect, as liberalism requires, the autonomy of others (Appiah, 2003). Invoking autonomy building and rejecting exposure to the challenges brought about by cultural diversity, seems to be a contradiction in terms that worries critics of liberal education (Burtt, 2003).

For many liberals “common schools” are a favored context in which to realize common education based on liberal democratic philosophical and educational ideals and embodying an appropriate balance between the complex unifying and diversifying imperatives (McLaughlin, 2003). However, for more radical ones every cultural deviation is a threat to national coherence. State education should have little concern with the culture of each specific group represented at school and with the way it treats its members (Schlesinger, 1998; Kukathas, 1992).

Communitarianism in education

At the other end of the spectrum lie those who advocate that the right to culture justifies the right to publicly subsidized separate schooling. Margalit and Halbertal (1994) claim that minority groups, such as the Orthodox Jews and Arab-Israelis in the Israeli context cannot maintain specific aspects of their culture without the privilege of separate schooling and a curriculum controlled exclusively by the community. While they believe that one must always retain the right to exit one’s culture, Reich argues that is difficult to see how one would be able to do so if one has not acquired the capacity to question the value of allegiance to one’s group’s cultural norms and practices.

Kymlicka, similarly, supports rights to separate education for national minorities, albeit in a much more sophisticated approach than the previous writers. He defends the right for at least some cultural groups to exercise control over the educational experiences of their children or broad exemptions from educational requirements that are otherwise binding for the rest of the citizens. Kymlicka (1995) connects freedom with culture. Membership in a secure, rich and stable culture is a precondition for freedom of choice and individual flourishing. Following the liberalist educational project he endorses the concept of autonomy and asserts that cultural membership is a precondition for autonomous decision making within cultures. A critique raised to Kymlicka’s defense of minority rights concerns the extent to which separate schooling denies the educational conditions necessary for developing autonomy and exercising a meaningful right to exit (Reich, 2003).

There has been a widely held belief among multicultural theorists that cultural difference-blind public education favors majority cultures and disadvantages national minority or ethnocultural groups. However, the preservation of identity mobilized by national minorities that often resist integration into the common culture and seek to protect their separate existence by consolidating their own societal cultures, often results in equally poor achievement (Fordham, 1990). Wagner (1991) discusses two distinct forms of what he calls ‘subordinated group illiteracy’: ‘illiteracy of oppression’ and ‘illiteracy of resistance’. Both types of illiteracy derive from basic problems of access to appropriate schooling. ‘Illiteracy of oppression’ is brought about by the majority society. It is a direct consequence of the process of integration/assimilation operant in the public school and in the entire society. It results in the slow destruction of identity and cultivates mechanisms of resistance in minorities. ‘Illiteracy of resistance’, although caused by oppression, is to some extent instituted by the minorities themselves. By wishing to safeguard their language and culture, and fearing assimilation, minorities turn against themselves and reject the form of education imposed by the majority group. At the extreme, says Wagner, minorities would prefer to remain illiterate, rather than risk losing their language and culture.

Dimensions and practice of intercultural education

Going back from where we started this paper, to the European Union discourse and how it manifests itself in educational policy, a critique has been developed on the grounds that there is an explicit or implicit Eurocentrism, underplaying the contribution to civilization of non-European others. The argumentation raised is that the identity promoted is defined on the basis of an ethno-cultural bounded entity of shared beliefs, way of life, history and heritage. As Hansen notes: “Nowhere in the culture and educational policies is there any real discussion of how this particular and ethno-cultural depiction of ‘Europe’ squares with the situation for ethnic minorities with migrant backgrounds” (2000:103).

Multicultural education in practice did not develop in a uniform way since the core issues were not the same everywhere. It inevitably followed the specific migration experience and the particular history, economy and state structure of each country. Nevertheless, one can trace shared courses of action in the move from a monocultural/asssimilationist model to a multicultural one. Academic failure of immigrant and minority children was, at first, attributed to their minority status and the fact that they came from the poorest sections of society was disregarded, obscuring thus the influence of social class on educational achievement. Schools, as a rule, embarked upon multicultural initiatives celebrating cultural diversity. Focusing on the superficial manifestations of culture, it remained within the logic of assimilationism and had little or no influence on much of what affected the lives of marginalized children and their families (Dragonas et al., 1996).

Today there seems to be an overall agreement about the objectives of intercultural education as well as the policies and institutional changes required to meet them. Yet despite the consensus there is a tremendous gap between theory and practice. Banks (1995) conceptualizes multicultural education on the basis of five dimensions: (a) Content integration dealing with curricular changes in the fields of history, literature, religion, languages of instruction etc. and the types of pedagogy that are appropriate to develop intercultural skills. (b) A knowledge construction process reflecting the social, cultural and power positions of people within society and the consequent need that students develop capacities such as intellectual curiosity, self reflectivity, the ability to weigh up arguments and form an independent judgment. (c) Prejudice reduction aiming to help students develop more democratic attitudes, values, and behaviors through pedagogic strategies such is, for example, cooperative learning. (d) Equity pedagogy referring to the development of teaching techniques and strategies that would improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students, (e) An empowering school culture and social structure conveying the adoption of a systems approach to bring about meaningful changes in the school.

In similar lines, Cummins (1996; 2004) focuses on the negotiation of identities and the need of empowering teachers and students, relating educational practice to societal issues and shifting to relationships as opposed to individuals. He has very convincingly shown that interactions between educators and culturally diverse students are never neutral with respect to societal power relations. Historically subordinated students have been disempowered educationally in the same way their communities have been disempowered in the wider society. Students react to this discrimination along a continuum ranging from inernalization of a sense of ambivalence or insecurity about their identities, to rejection of and active resistance to, dominant group values. At both extremes, alienation from schooling and mental withdrawl from academic effort have been a frequent consequence. At this point it is worth going back to the drawing of the Albanian boy, where we started from, revealing his despair of being a stranger in a foreign land.[5]

As was the case with integration policies, discussed earlier, similarly in education, negotiation of identity is grounded on the ideal of equal participation in common institutions. When members of minority groups exercise their rights, they should not be separated from the majority, but effectively integrated in the decision-making process. Multiculturalist policies that separate the minority from the majority may bring neither justice, nor stability in a state.

Cummins (2004) incites a transformative orientation that does not entail sacrificing a concern with student achievement, as measured by conventional methods. The instructional approaches, within the transformative orientation he promotes, engage students in extensive reading, critical discussion, and writing, all of which have been shown to be significant determinants of reading comprehension. Subordinated group students engage actively with the instructional process only in contexts where their identities are being affirmed.

Cultural diversity in Greece

Modern Greek society has been for historical and socioeconomic reasons, relatively homogeneous. The wars between Greece and the Ottoman Empire at first, and then Turkey and the neighboring Balkan countries, from the nineteenth century into the 1920s, were followed by a forced exchange of populations in the 1930s. This moved much of the Turkish and Slav minorities beyond the Greek frontiers. Subsequently, between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis exterminated almost the entire Jewish population of Northern Greece. Similarly, the Chams (Muslim Albanian-speaking populations), and in 1949 the Slavo-Macedonians were subject to persecution. Thus, after the end of the civil war in 1949 and up until the 1990s, when immigrants started to flow in Greece in big numbers, the Greek nationalists could easily establish the myth that Greece was a homogeneous, mono-ethnic, mono-cultural and mono-religious society, with the exception of the Muslim minority.

The Muslim minority is the only formally recognized territorial minority, protected by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Owing to the provisions made by the Treaty the Muslims of Western Thrace enjoy a number of cultural and religious rights, such as the right to bilingual education and to be judged under shari’a law for family and inheritance matters. Other culturally diverse groups such as a small Slav-speaking population in the Northwest of Greece or the rather substantial Roma population, are not officially recognized as a minority nor are they protected in a specific way.

The arrivals of large bodies of immigrants during the last 20 years, reaching more than 10 percent of the total Greek population, challenged the Greek society, placed multiculturality on the public agenda. Greece having been a country of emigration is forced to rethink itself as a country of immigration. The deep economic crisis and that of the political system have fuelled racist and nationalist discourses and practice that develop all the more as social problems as exclusion and downwards mobility extend, and as anxiety grows in regard to national identity.[6] The crisis of national identities fits the hypothesis of new cultural racism, the main form of racism in the contemporary world, whereby the “other” is nor represented as an inferior being but rather as fundamentally different, having no room in one’s society, being an invader that should be kept at some distance or get expelled. Wieworka (1992) describes very eloquently this mutation of racism.

Unlike the on-going debates in Northern and Western Europe, the dominant public discourses in Greece, lack sophistication, are a long way short of those discussing, various theory-based approaches to integration policies and are reluctant to acknowledge that multiculturalism requires accommodation of cultural diversity. With the exception of discourses within the academic community and among intellectuals, there is little awareness that identities are not monolithic and static.

The assumption that national identity precludes cultural “otherness”, cuts-across all political parties while it is the central argument of a far-right that appeared in a softer version in 2007, and has evolved into a neo-Nazi party (Golden Dawn) with a growing popularity to the point of being, according to polls, the third most popular party. Immigrants are the main target of their policy. Parliamentary deputies have been filmed attacking immigrant vendors, they demand that all non-Greek children are kicked out of day care centers and hospitals and its supporters are involved in increasing racist violence. Golden Dawn draws from fear. Greece is the entry point of 80% of the EU’s un-documented migrants. It is estimated that 57,000 immigrants entered Greece in 2011 and 100,000 in 2010.[7] Greece has had no integrated strategy to deal with immigrants and asylum seekers and in the midst of an acute economic crisis finds itself in a helpless position. While “Greece belongs to the Greeks”, is a populist slogan used by the extreme right, touches the hearts of many.

Greek citizenship has been broadly based on the jus sanguinis principle until 2010 when a citizenship law was introduced facilitating naturalization, citizenship acquisition and political rights.[8] This law was greeted with great apprehension by the conservative party, then in opposition. Two and a half years later the State Council considered it anti-constitutional. Among the reasons given the most striking was that naturalization cannot take place unless there is a ‘real bond’ between the foreigner and the Greek nation, and this bond cannot be established by formal legal requirements, as is the fact of being born in Greece, or the parents’ length of stay in the country, or having been in school for six years.As notes Triandafyllidou, [9] “the State Council’s decision to consider the citizenship law as unconstitutional is against the current EU trend for a stronger territorial and civic element in citizenship legislation. It reintroduces a particularly strong jus sanguinis requirement to Greek citizenship disregarding the fact that Greece has been de facto converted to a country that is culturally and religiously diverse…‘Protecting’ the Greek nation from foreigners who do not have a ‘real bond’ with the nation means actually further undermining the already fragile Greek democracy. It is indeed one of the main principles of democratic governance that people who are members of a society, work, go to school, pay taxes, live in the country, should have a say into how this country is governed.”

Educational responses to cultural diversity in Greece

The Greek educational system is extremely centralized and uniform, based on a single textbook that follows to the letter the detailed official curriculum for each grade; and, it is highly ethnocentric geared towards the development of national consciousness rather than the cultivation of critical thinking. In the national narrative reproduced in school, the Greek nation is systematically described as a natural, unified, eternal and unchanging entity, and not as a product of history. Research findings have indicated that the Eurocentric image of the preeminence of the Western European world is accepted in Greek society as evidently true so much by textbook as by many intellectuals, including school teachers (Frangoudaki & Dragonas, 1997). Thus the problematique of intercultural education entered very belatedly educational and social discourses.

It is the mid 1990s that mark a shift as regards the concern over accommodation of ethno-cultural diversity in school. The changing demographics owing to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Europeanization processes in Greece, and the pressure of international organizations towards minority protection, challenged pressingly the educational system. The student composition changed rapidly, 10% of the country’s school population being, at present, of non-Greek mother tongue, while there was a growing concern over the quality of education Muslim minority children were receiving. In 1996, the Greek Ministry of Education institutional measures were taken establishing, among others, 25 ‘intercultural schools’ that would apply differentiated curricula based on Greek as foreign language, reception and support classes for immigrant children, mother tongue learning, a Special Intercultural Education Secretariat at the Ministry of Education, and an affirmative action for Muslim minority students entering tertiary education with special exams.

At the same time three large-scale educational projects, were launched, funded largely by the European Social Fund, catering for the educational needs of three different groups of students: repatriated and foreign students, Roma, and those belonging to the Muslim minority in Thrace. The overall aim, for all three projects, was to reduce dropout from compulsory education; develop an intercultural dimension within the educational system; provide students the opportunity to benefit from education and enhance their social inclusion while maintaining their cultural characteristics.

Fifteen years have elapsed since the adoption of measures orientating education towards an intercultural policy. An appraisal of the achievements, thus far, is rather bleak. The ‘intercultural’ schools turned into ‘ghettos’ of low achieving, immigrant students, they never followed differentiated curricula, as they were supposed to, nor did they ever adopt mother tongue learning. Reception and support classes either remained parallel, separate, marginalized structures or withered away. Moreover, 25 schools cannot meet the need of ethnic minority students who represent a much larger foreign student population dispersed across the country (Trouki, 2012). The outcome of three large targeted projects varies in quality and their evaluation is beyond the scope of this paper. They each face very dissimilar challenges owing to the different populations they address and the claims they raise. For example, there is concern from large pockets of Muslim minority members to hang on to separate schooling safeguarding language and religion, while this is not the case for Roma children; or as stated earlier, the expectations from the educational system vary across the range of immigrant groups who have disparate adaptation strategies. All the same, large amount of funds were allocated to all three projects; teaching materials were developed; extensive teacher training took place; inside and out of school interventions were carried out. The most important failing , however, is that these interventions run separate and parallel to the mainstream school that keeps following a monocultural and assimilationist agenda. The intercultural dimension continues to be very restricted and is ‘boxed’ in very specific contexts (Gropas & Trandafyllidou, 2013). Policy makers resist the idea that the educational system needs to adopt an intercultural orientation in order deal effectively with student cultural diversity and create an inclusive, empowering educational environment. They are unaware of the fact that intercultural education concerns equally minority and majority students and the relationship between the two.

From an alienating school environment breeding ‘xenohoria’ to an empowering one

Multicultural societies present unparalleled challenges and societies have to reconcile shared citizenship and political unity with the recognition and respect of cultural identities. Working through a collective present, as locus of social agency, requires that identities are negotiated and that the dynamic character of culture is appreciated. This is a formidable task that is doomed to fail if theory from a number of disciplinary perspectives, policy and practice are not dialogically interconnected with each other.

In this paper the difference between ‘multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalist’ societies was highlighted; the various models of social integration were analyzed while the emphasis was placed beyond the liberal-communitarian divide to the notion of cultural hybridization, as formulated by Homi Bhabba. The negotiation of doubleness presupposes an open process where minority claims meet state policies and vice-versa, in order to jointly articulate a position that is subject to further conciliation and expansion. The implications of such a dialogic approach were transferred to the educational context. Borrowing from Cummins, it was stressed that accommodation of cultural diversity in learning environments, requires a focus on societal power relations and on the way these determine educational policy.

Greece, which has long assumed to be a culturally homogeneous society, faced unfamiliar challenges in responding to cultural diversity brought about by unprecedented waves of immigration. Confronted with political, economic and cultural uncertainties, has reactively adopted discourses and practices exclusive of cultural ‘otherness’. While in the educational arena, in the past 15 years intercultural policies were introduced, schools have remained assimilatory in their daily practice, reflecting a dominant ethnocentric orientation both at the social and educational levels. If the immigrant boy’s sorrow for being a stranger in a foreign land is to be appeased, the rapid transformation of educational structures is an urgent task, if forms of disempowerment are to be challenged.

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Footnotes

Note 1
“Gefyres”, 45, 2009. I am grateful to Professor Gella Varnava-Skouras for granting me the rights to publish this image.

Note 2
2010 joint progress report of the Council and the Commission on the implementation of the ‘Education and Training 2010 work programme, (2010/C 117/01), Official Journal of the European Union, IV, 6.5.2010.

Note 3
Council conclusions on the role of education and training in the implementation of the ‘Europe 20120’ strategy, (2011/C 70/01), Official Journal of the European Union, 4.3.2011.

Note 4
Decision no. 1983/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, L 412, 18.12.2006.

Note 5
Cummins 2004:51 highlights the systematic devaluation of student identities within the school that has been documented in contexts around the world and that are characterized by coercive relations of power in the wider society. He quotes a Finnish student describing the ‘internal suicide’ that he committed as a result of the rejection of his Finnish identity that he experienced in Swedish schools, a state that ‘had eaten deeply into his soul’.

Note 6
This is not an exclusive Greek phenomenon. The post-colonial multicultural, multiracial and multi-ethnic Europe presents challenges to societies that imagined themselves as homogeneous. Racism, intolerance, anti-Semitism and xenophobia persist, at both personal and institutional levels, in more or less virulent forms, in every single country of Europe (Ginsburg and Sondhi, 2000).

Note 7
J. Kakissis, “Why the rise of Greece’s Golden Dawn party is bad for Europe, Time Magazine, Nov 5, 2012, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2127808,00.html

Note 8
Law N. 3838/2010 lowered the requirement of naturalization from 10 to 7 years of legal residence; provided acquisition of citizenship for second generation immigrant children upon a simple declaration of their parents provided parents were living legally in Greece for at least 5 years and for those were born abroad of foreign parents but who had at least completed 6 years of schooling; gave full local political rights to those legally living in Greece for 5 years and the right to vote in national elections

Note 9
A. Triandafyllidou, “Greece belongs to the Greeks” –but who are the Greeks that it belongs to? Nov. 22, 2012, http://www.rscas.org/accept/blog/?p=182