Schools for Intercultural Education: from Multiculturalism to Interculturalism

This paper is offering both theoretical and practical framework for rethinking multiculturalism from local perspective. The main hypothesis is that thinking multiculturalism has its own peculiarities that defers from society to society and that those should be taken into consideration when thinking of this phenomenon. Our claim is that every concept of multiculturalism is derived from specific local circumstances and thus addresses the problems connected with those specific circumstances. Thus, as one can see, here in Macedonian circumstances we do have specific multicultural challenges but we lack specific theoretical response and practical solution to those challenges. We suppose that narrow treatment of multiculturalism, as multi-ethnicism, and interculturalism as interethnicism is too inappropriate, not only from practical point of view, but rather from theoretical and scientific. One’s identity is not determined solely by his ethnical background, but rather by a complexity of factors that influence and build one`s personal identity. Secondly, and more important, staying solely on the ground of multiculturalism does not provide society’s integration. Looking that way on multiculturalism, we can agree that multiculturalism is dead, even more it was not alive ever. Multiculturalism is possible as interculturalism, and thus intercultural integration. Actually, only interculturalisam can provide intercultural integration it the society. This paper is just an attempt to depict the theoretical and practical framework of that possibility. It shows that movement of the perspective from false integrational to truly integrational thanks to the intercultural integration. Staying on multiculturalism solely cannot take the society to full and total integration. Actually staying on multiculturalism can provide only false picture that we are practising multiculturalism, while in reality there is minimum tolerance and maximum distance between different ethnical and cultural groups. They tolerate each other to the extend sufficient to live “besides” not “with” each other. This cannot lead to tolerance in long term. Truly multicultural society is fully integrated society. This paper offers theoretical development of the model of intercultural integration in schools that can be effective in establishing and promoting intercultural integration. The practical implementation of the model was offered by an NGO, and this paper is result of author’s involvement into that project. I was asked to develop theoretical framework of the intercultural integration practise which I did, this paper is a part of that effort. Keywords: multiculturalism, intercultural integration, interculturalism, school, educatio