Managing Differences: Contemporary World's Challenges

Managing differences is a pressing and essential issue for the world we live in, both theoretically and practically; school and education are involved in managing the consequences of globalization, which means that it must respond on the one hand to the needs of grobalization and, on the other hand to the needs of glocalization. Just as in modernity school represented the central field for cultivating unity (reason and autonomy), in postmodernity it has become a battlefield for facing and/or confronting differences (for their legitimation or on behalf of them). From Kant to Derrida, we firmly believe school must know and be able to manage the balance between unity and differences. All educational areas face the difficulty of striking a balance between unity and diversity, between identity and otherness. Managing differences points to other issue of the other (Marc Guillaume) or of the stranger next to us (Zygmunt Bauman), but it tries to provide a softer perspective which is desirable in concretizing the consequences of these global, national, local, social, cultural and economic relations. The present volume is trying to raise some of the globalization issues.