The Role of Intercultural Education in Fostering Cross-Cultural Understanding

Abstract

In today's globalized world mono-cultural societies have been gradually disappearing. A trend towards the creation of multicultural societies began in 1960s. Migration, the impact of globalization and modern technology played decisive role for the creation of multicultural societies. For instance, new multicultural societies were forced by the virtue of new conditions to engage themselves with others. Therefore, people were purposefully trained for quality communication and peaceful coexistence with societies that possessed different cultural traits. For this purpose, the number of international institutions has adopted documents, which became the backbone of new education policy. Therefore, the school systems began to work intensively on the promotion of intercultural values ​​among young people. Schools had to curb all forms of intolerance, discrimination, segregation, xenophobia and racism. Yet nowadays many multicultural nations encounter with difficulties in holding together multicultural diversity and in establishing harmonious interpersonal relationships. Therefore this paper deals with multiculturalism and the role of the education system in fostering cross-cultural understanding. If multiculturalism is accepted as an asset not as a burden, with its proper utilization within the education system, multicultural nations would inevitably continue to benefit from their diversity.