Introduction

Abstract

Education is a topic almost constantly in the news. This is hardly surprising since it impinges on our lives in many different ways, whether we be pupil, student, parent, member of the older generation, tax-payer or rate-payer. As a result most of us place a good deal of faith, even blind faith, in education. Education is also intimately connected with the problems of plural societies. Studies in Britain and America have shown that education, especially intercultural education, has a marked effect on the social and personal development of the individual. Writing about the basic premise of intercultural education Allport (1958) remarked that ‘no person knows his own culture who knows only his own culture’. But let us not pretend that all the problems of individual development in a plural society can be solved by education alone. There are other forces which create strains and anxieties and may seriously affect the development of an individual; one of these is the kind of structural and social systems in which people live.