Intercultural Education as an Exercise in Human Rights

What can we do to confront discrimination and the violation of human rights in Peru? How do we ensure that the structural causes of the bloodiest conflict in our history disappear once and for all? These are questions that, on more than one occasion and even with some anguish, we have sought to answer and overcome both from the State and from ordinary citizens in Peru. Throughout our history as a republic, we can see how the dominant intellectual and political elites sought to "solve" these problems through the State. It is common to think that these initiatives never existed, given the characteristics of the society in which we live. However, drawing on the academic output of the Social Sciences, we can see that these efforts did take place, even though in the desire to overcome them, the State itself built and implemented policies that progressively entrenched the discriminatory and exclusionary structures that our society faces on a daily basis. To reverse this reality, the author tells us, we must rid ourselves of the four ghosts that have historically justified it. These are the four myths analyzed and problematized in the text: the myth of cultural mestizaje, the myth of the monocultural State, the myth of the school, and the myth of the "all-knowing teacher" and the "student who knows nothing." All of these are functional to the paradigms mentioned above. In this sense, recognizing - as the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación concluded - that the subversive groups found in our traditional, discriminatory, and authoritarian educational system a vehicle to spread their terrorist agenda, it is essential to confront this problem by overcoming these myths, which must be replaced by the promotion of a democratic and pluralistic education, that is, an intercultural education. (Excerpts from the Foreword).