The importance of multicultural classes at school
This is why multicultural classes at school are not only the place where educational and civilization values are learned, but also knowledge and expressive skills. The article by Francesco Provinciali
When there are boys and girls from all over the world in a classroom, one feels how great and important, perhaps decisive, the significance of that presence could be for the future of humanity.
After the family, the school is the place of the first socialization, that is, of the opening of credit to interpersonal relationships, but also of the formation of intelligence and character and of the transmission of those values of civilization that can give meaning to our life.
There is an extraordinary richness inherent in that human potential: of minds and hearts ready to receive good teachings, of creatures that are growing and to whom it can be pointed out – with the institutional and moral authority that is implicit in the task of educators – the way of good so that they can then find for themselves that of truth.
They are boys and girls who do not yet know anything about the wickedness and malice of the world and who certainly do not attribute to the cultures of origin, different ethnic groups, religious confessions or skin color those distinctive and selective meanings, sometimes of heritage, which adults usually use when relating to each other.
The most extraordinary task that awaits any educator is to form open, critical and free minds and this process takes place naturally in a multicultural context.
The school welcomes everyone and in this openness lies the most important and significant sense of its being a place of education.
Even from a strictly didactic point of view, the linguistic melting pot accelerates and promotes understanding and communication between people.
It is in fact known that the use and enrichment of languages does not occur only through the acquisition of syntactic and grammatical rules but by 'immersion', by 'osmosis', even by' promiscuity, that is, by entering into direct contact with the environment. culture and life whose learning should be borrowed.
The metabolization of linguistic contents therefore takes place more easily in an open and fluent communicative context rather than in a closed and separate one: in the first case the learning takes place by participating in a 'live' and direct form in verbal socialization, in the second only by sending dry minds notions that need to be then declined in the use of the word.
Interpersonal relationships are an extraordinary facilitating agent with respect to language skills, more than what happens through the mere transmission of notions and rules in separate training contexts: there is no place where one learns that is clearly distinct from the one where one lives, because both they coexist in the didactic act, one teaches and learns while living among others.
The most consolidated acquisitions of pedagogical research have shown that there is a phase of linguistic competence that precedes expressive learning in the strict sense: it can in fact be said, for example, that in the study of a foreign language, one 'thinks bilingual' even before to 'speak bilingual'.
I therefore believe I can confidently argue that a return to "differentiated" classes, this time by linguistic matrix of origin, would be a step backwards with respect to the cultural and didactic evidence that the choices of integration and inclusion have made, both in terms of educational values and of civilization both in terms of the pragmatic utility of possessing in a short time and in the most facilitated and spontaneous way the keys that open to knowledge and expressive skills and that allow us to understand and communicate.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/limportanza-delle-classi-multiculturali-a-scuola/ on Sat, 16 Jul 2022 06:14:02 +0000.