In June 2003, IIEP organized its annual Policy Forum, this year to discuss the impact of increasingly multi-ethnic and multicultural societies on education in general and the implications for educational planning in particular. The Policy Forum explored three different models of organizing education systems for addressing ethnic and cultural diversity in terms of their intellectual roots and philosophy, as well as their principles of organization and implementation: (a) the integration model whereby students are enrolled in the same universal system and where individual merit decides personal future; (b) the multicultural model whereby diverse groups – both migrant and indigenous – cultivate differences within the same unitary system in terms of language of instruction and ethnically sensitive content; and (c) the parallel model whereby different segments of the school system are designed to cater to different linguistic or ethnic groups. There are three particular areas where policy-makers and educational planners can make a difference in the context of multi-ethnicity. They relate to educational content, language policy and teacher training. This forum provided the opportunity to open up a dialogue between national policy-makers and academic experts on multicultural education from both developing and industrialized countries and brought out enriching experiences for a better communication between both worlds in the interest of education systems.
