ABSTRACT
Intercultural education, addressing mainly the European conception of culture, still dominant in all EU countries, aims to deny this belief of cultural European Union policy considers the educational system to play an important role in fighting the negative stereotypes, assumed by each national group, about the ‘other’. The influence of intercultural ideas is notable in all EU countries and, as far as their incorporation in education is concerned, developments have been radical Antiquity is seen as the emblem distinguishing Greek people from their ‘southern’ and ‘oriental’ inferiority, by rendering them equal members of the aristocratic European ‘family’. The reasons accounting for the intensification of nationalist and cultural racisms, in both western and eastern Europe, are issues open to further research. Finally, intercultural education can be a means of change if pupils understand that the notion of cultural purity, intrinsic in all discriminatory ideas, is based on an indirect claim for the elimination of differences.
