Diversity in school: 'E pluribus unum'

"E pluribus unum" (Unity in plurality) is the motto on the coat of arms of the United States, the title of a landmark 2007 academic article, and the ideal of any society that makes pluralism a supreme constitutional value, which is to promote the freedom of citizens without fostering their division into factions.The article was signed by the social democratic sociologist Robert Putnam, who was an advisor to Clinton, Tony Blair and Obama, and begins as follows: "One of the most important challenges facing modern societies, and at the same time one of our most significant opportunities, is the increase in ethnic and social heterogeneity in practically all advanced countries".There is –Putnam assures us– a limit to plurality beyond which it becomes difficult to maintain the ideal of a community made up of heterogeneous members. If it is crossed, plurality degrades into the atomization of isolated individuals who have no intermediaries between their self and the community space.The growth of social heterogeneity is favored both by migratory dynamics and by underlying currents in modern societies that tend to see value in difference. In fact, today we understand equality as the equal right to be different (hence dominant emotivism). In schools it is said that each student learns differently (when our similarities are greater than our differences) and at universities there is an insistence on the incommensurability of different cultures. We are privatizing morality, but since we are unable to provide ourselves with a coherent moral order, we have burdened ourselves with such excessive responsibilities that we end up evading them. However, if we erode shared moral standards, we deprive ourselves of the possibility of peacefully resolving the inevitable disputes of communal life.It would be culturally suicidal to ignore the challenges of heterogeneity. The phenomenon of native flight” is well known, for example, which tells us that when the concentration of immigrant students in educational centers reaches certain thresholds, native families take their children to centers with a more homogeneous student body. Something similar happens in neighborhoods, leisure spaces, and public services.

To a newcomer, we do not ask, from the outset, that they consider the cultural tradition of the host country more valuable than their own. Nothing prevents them from reserving their loyalty for the tradition of which they consider themselves a descendant. If we want them to one day consider themselves heir to the cultural traditions of the host country, the decisive instrument is the school... provided it assumes that it cannot renounce the transmission of the best of its cultural legacy to future generations. It is not a matter of transmitting only folkloric components, but of making our historical current credible and stimulating, which is, certainly, complex and diverse, but which makes possible what the verb anostrar connotes.This, ours, was the republican mission of the school when it believed itself responsible for the transformation of a child into a citizen. Today, determined to play with fire, criticisms (culturally suicidal) of the transmitting teacher (the black beast of the "new" pedagogy) are frequent, while the school allows itself to be dragged by a therapeutic drift. Péguy said that the teacher "is the unique and inestimable representative of poets and artists, of philosophers and of all men who have made humanity and who maintain it." This means teaching, representing, making teachings visible, showing impulses, orienting the gaze and attention. Today, however, teachers are bombarded with the refrain that the teacher's transmission must be replaced by the autonomous construction of their knowledge by the student himself.In a general sense, the more diversity grows within the school, the more students entrench themselves in their cultural differences and their own ways of constructing knowledge. Our schools are self-fulfilling prophecies.Putnam distinguishes between links and bridges. The link appears spontaneously with those who resemble us. But to guarantee the good health of the unum bridges are needed between people of different cultural traditions. Countries that have both types of links have turned challenges into opportunities. If we want to continue on this path, we must make social mobility credible. And the key to opening the door is common culture.It is not about denying plurality. Today's open societies have no way of closing themselves within their borders. But somehow we must foster a sense of unity if we are to preserve continuity.