Towards access for all to cultural diversity
read more...While ensuring the free flow of ideas by word and image care should be exercised that all cultures can express themselves and make themselves known. Freedom of expression, media pluralism, multilingualism,
equal access to art and to scientific and technological knowledge, including in digital form, and the possibility for all cultures to have access to the means of expression and dissemination are the guarantees of cultural diversity.
There is an old Bengali saying that knowledge is a very special commodity: the more you give away, the more you have left. Imparting education not only enlightens the receiver, but also broadens the giver – the teachers, the parents, the friends.
Indeed, the nature of education is quite central to peace in the world.
Recently the perspective of “clash of civilizations” has gained much currency, and what is most immediately divisive in this outlook is not the idea of the inevitability of a clash, but the prior insistence on seeing human beings in terms of one dimension only. To see people in terms of this allegedly pre-eminent and all-engulfing classification of civilizations can itself contribute to political insecurity, since in this view people are seen as simply belonging to, say, “the Muslim world,” or “the Western world,” or “the Hindu world,” or “the Buddhist world,” and so on.
As it happens, every human being has many identities, related to nationality, language, location, class, religion, occupation, political beliefs, and so on. To ignore everything other than some single, allegedly profound, way of classifying people is to set them up into warring camps.
The best hope for peace in the world lies in the simple but far-reaching recognition that we all have many different associations and affiliations, and we need not see ourselves as being rigidly divided by a single categorization of hardened groups which confront each other.
Here too schooling, with an appropriate concern for real history and basic values such as the universal need for tolerance, can have a very positive and constructive role. The importance of non-sectarian and non-parochial curricula that expand, rather than reduce, the reach of reason can be hard to exaggerate.
In the schooling curriculum, we have to make sure that we do not have smallness “thrust upon” the young. We have to make sure that sectarian schooling does not convert education into a prison, rather than being a passport to the wide world (as it is meant to be). Education can be a great liberator of the human mind, with many indirect benefits – economic, political and social.