"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.

When she was 6 years old, teacher Maryam El Hamidi (Tangier, 1994) experienced firsthand the ordeal her students have recently gone through. With her mother and sister, they came to live in Castelló d’Empúries to reunite with her father in the year 2000. "In the schools where I have worked, they see me as a mirror. Especially women, they see a role model. Perhaps I haven't gone through the same circumstances as them, but I know their needs. I give them confidence and motivation. If the road is long, I make it shorter," assures El Hamidi.

In the school in Girona that I attended as a child, Carol Law Lee, of Chinese origin, was for a long time the only girl with parents from abroad. “I felt exotic. The older students would touch my hair and say it looked like threads!”, she recalls. Years later, however, another Chinese girl arrived, whom she “felt close to” and “was very eager to meet”.

We live in strange times: hatred has become a national pastime. It doesn't take much to ignite it: three headlines, two talk shows, and a couple of tweets, and suddenly half the country is judging the other half from the comfort of their sofas, with pre-packaged opinions. Curiously, in this race to point fingers, schools are always mentioned. As if the social fracture were the fault of a poorly corrected dictation or a badly presented media project.

High-complexity schools are today the vanguard of our education system. Where dozens of languages, histories, and expectations coexist, the harshest social inequalities and the most transformative opportunities are also concentrated. In these contexts, the Catalan language plays a decisive role: it can become the passport that opens the door to equal opportunities or, if not worked on intensively and rigorously, it can become another factor of inequality.

In Perfectly imperfect (Universo), writer and screenwriter Carla Gracia constructs a fictional narrative to address very real issues: life with a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the lack of shared responsibility in parenting, and the complexity of family relationships. A theatrical adaptation is already in preparation. And this September, she will publish the children's book. The Adventures of Capybara and His Friends.

At a time when polarization and hate speech against minorities are spreading, and when face-to-face communication between people is increasingly difficult to achieve, there is a movement in Copenhagen that goes against the grain. In a green corner of the Danish capital is the "human library" (Menneskebiblioteket in Danish), where, unlike traditional libraries, you don't borrow books, but rather people with whom you can converse. Each book on its shelves represents a group of people who are not very visible in society and who are often subjected to prejudice, discrimination or stigmatization.

Male and female. Masculine and feminine. This binary classification of the world leaves out many people who do not identify with it. They are the people with other gender identities and sexual orientations represented by the acronym LGTBI+. The new generations claim this diversity and push society to look beyond genitalia.