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Schools and cultural difference 317

and economic disadvantages, have also become influential. These programs
tend to distance themselves from the idea that cultural differences and problems
in intercultural communication can be ignored in educational practice or over-
come by assimilating all pupils to the same national culture. At the same time,
multicultural education is by no means a panacea for social and cultural ten-
sions, for the institutional recognition of ethnic differences goes hand in hand
with tendencies to accept and fix ethnic labellings and prejudices (see Reisigl in
this volume). This leads to the paradox of trying to overcome ethnicity as a
mechanism of discrimination and repression by elevating ethnicity to the status
of a legitimate category for steering social and educational practice. Thus, to re-
duce the importance of ethnic labelling, pupils are in fact ethnically labeled, in
the end giving these labellings not a reduced, but a higher importance. Fur-
thermore, by recognizing their ties to cultural groups, pupils are inhibited from
achieving distance to these groups and individual autonomy, which can be of
particular importance in conflicts with parents and ‘members of one’s own cul-
ture’. Growing up in modern, liberal societies, pupils are not compulsively
bound to their ethnic-cultural backgrounds, and in accord with the values of
these societies, they can legitimately free themselves from the claims of specific
cultural traditions.
The contrary paradigm, represented in the policies of France, where they de-
rive from a specific commitment to republican and democratic ideals, posits the
essential unimportance of ethnicity and cultural difference. It, too, offers no
complete answer to a situation in which social inequalities are merged with cul-
tural differences and attributions, for the underlying premise of the school as an
island that can be effectively insulated from disturbing social and parental in-
fluences is a fiction that cannot be upheld. Universalism and strict rejection of
cultural particularity are not sufficient to overcome the drag of social disadvan-
tage on individual aspirations, nor can a policy of equal treatment of all pupils,
blind to ethnic and social groupings, react to the subtle forms of structural dis-
criminated that are named and explicitly addressed in Canada and Great Britain.
Against the background of the programmatic difficulties faced by both the
multicultural and the republican orientations, intercultural research and peda-
gogical theory face the task of developing sensibility to forms of structural and
institutional discrimination, and to the complex interaction of attributions, la-
bellings and identifications with processes of distancing and achievement of
personal autonomy.