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Schools and cultural difference 315

school’s language of instruction. Likewise, however, courses in the minority
languages of the community are to be offered, and pupils are to be encouraged to
develop their knowledge of their first language. Furthermore, the guidelines em-
phasize that dialects differing from Canadian Standard English are not to be
stigmatized (Ministry of Education and Training Ontario 1993: 14). Thus, Ca-
nadian educational policies differ radically from the French program of ethni-
cally blind equality, whose efforts are concentrated on measures directed
against intentional discrimination and racial insults.

3.5. Involvement and exclusion of communities
Opening schools to the communities they serve is a key measure in the school re-
forms that have been attempted in Canada and in Britain, one meant to draw the
experience and concerns of immigrant and minority groups into the schools’ de-
velopment. The schools actively seek to improve communication with parents
from immigrant populations, in order to compensate for these parents’ under-
representation in school activities, conferences and in the parent–teacher associ-
ations. Additional measures have been taken in Britain and Canada to overcome
language barriers that hinder parents from participating in school affairs.
In France, on the other hand, schools are understood to be neutral institu-
tions committed to republican universalism, and their task is therefore taken to
be that of overcoming regional and ethnic identifications as well as cultural par-
ticularism. Pupils are to be perceived and treated above all as individuals and as
citizens, not as members of groups, and this is meant to enable them to shake off
traditional cultural and religious ties. This orientation brings with it the goal of
insulating both pupils and educational practice from the parents’ influence.
Thus, in contrast to Britain and Canada, no special effort is made to involve par-
ents in school affairs, as representatives of a community or of a culture of origin,
and obtaining their participation is not a goal of French educational policy.
Nevertheless, immigrants do join political initiatives that speak out on socially
controversial issues, among them those that affect education. These attitudes to-
ward schools’ relationships to their immediate communities and their signifi-
cant cultural symbols find expression in the architectural features of French
schools, as a recent ethnographic study has shown (Schiffauer et al. 2002): they
are typically isolated from their surroundings by walls, fences and closed gates,
while British schools tend to lack such isolating elements.

3.6. Curricula
Adopting the goal of transmitting an adequate representation of the knowledge
and history of its minorities, Canadian educational policy has committed itself
to multiculturalism and the abandonment of a Europe-centric, dominant culture