Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: a propos of a minority educational reform

intra-nation cultural relativism of pluralist multi-culturalism as the
new set of values imbricating all aspects of education systems.

However, whilst appearing to support a strong critical multi-
culturalism, Article 29 locates cultural rights, or ethnicity, in
education within an essentialist communitarian paradigm. Cultures
are constructed as static, unchanging and unproblematically
constitutive of human subjects: “the child’s... cultural identity,
language and values”, “the national values of the country in which
the child is living”, “the national values of. the country from which
he or she may originate”. Thus, children are constructed as
members of diverse ethnic/national groups, and group
membership entails identical, culturally-specific identities - self-
contained and bounded bundles of communal values, different but
equal with regard to respect. The new intra-national, pluralist
cultural relativism appears to invoke a static cultural parallelism:
there is no notion here of either multiple identities, or of the organic
development of diasporic cultures (Gilroy, 2000), or even of
intercultural education (Gundara, 2000).

Having said earlier that Article 29 represents a crucial progressive
moment for/in national education systems, the way in which
cultures and ethnicities are conceptualised raises key tensions
between the universality of respect for difference and the more or
less overtly communitarian politics of difference and its effects,
group differentiation by cultural identities and values. Thus it
would appear that the tension between the older cultural relativism
of nation state specificity and the new cultural relativism of multi-
cultural, pluralism of nations is resolved through a communitarian

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