Migrated from Global South, enrolled at segregated schools: Global North wants ‘to live together’?

“Learning to live together” is identified as one of the four pillars of education by the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century. Besides this identification, reality is though: school segregation levels remain high everywhere in the Global North. “How can those people who have much more than they need be educated to live together with those who lack the basic necessities?”, asked UNESCO itself back in 2001.

Last May, 24 organizations from all over Europe launched a joint manifesto on the occasion of the European elections: “School segregation is a threat to the very fabric of our societies and democracies. Children from different socioeconomic backgrounds are growing up separate from one another throughout the EU because they are attending segregated schools. It is the fuel of social divide and extremism” (PDF). Despite this alarm sounding on this systemic racist and discriminating reality, very few politicians thought this claim it’s on them.

In fact, school segregation is becoming a crucial point in our realities… People migrating from Global South sees how their kids are enrolled in deprived schools in the Global North, left behind by their receiving societies… So, the promise “you will work hard here and your kids will have a great education and could be part of the society” is kinda broken.

White/middle class/voting families mostly enrol their kids where other white/middle class/voting families do. So, children from migrant/poor/non-voting backgrounds are schooled in segregated schools. Policies tending to break these tendencies tend to fall short, as middle class voting families tend not to support them. And problems deepen: not knowing your own neighbours fuels extremism. Social cohesion “is built up throughout life”, being school time the initial and most important moment.

So, combating school segregation is not just about equal opportunities, it is about democracy. Because, as academic research shows, “those who sent their children to a charter school are the ones who most prefer their children to interact with people of the same culture or religion, and they also are those who are most bothered by the fact that people from other origins or cultures do not adapt to the customs of the country. In this sense, in addition to promoting intercultural and anti-racist education in all types of schools, it is necessary to avoid school segregation, because it prevents encounter and plural dialogue“.

Also, other analysis based on Catalan school system shows: “Schools with greater cultural diversity and larger numbers of foreign pupils present lower rates of xenophobia among the pupil body (25.9%) than schools with zero per cent to 25 per cent of pupils from immigrant backgrounds (39%)”. And “the more culturally diverse the school, the more interethnic relations within the pupil body increase, whilst they decrease when there is a small ethnic minority”.

The European Council adopted in 2022 the Recommendation on “Pathways to School Success”, whereby states are called upon to develop, by 2025, school success strategies to minimize the effects of socio-economic status or ethnicity on educational outcomes, promote inclusion and reduce early school leaving. However, the current lack of specific EU strategies to tackle school segregation hampers the achievement of these priority objectives.

European Parliament itself “strongly condemns the practice of racial and ethnic segregation in schools, which is still present in Europe”, as such practices “lead to marginalisation, early dropouts, low enrolment rates and the creation of parallel social spaces, perpetuate structural discrimination and hamper equal access to quality of life” (PDF).

Usually it’s said migrants are bound to adapt to new societies. But did migration-receiving societies have any responsibility in this process? Between forcing school enrollment changes to improve social mixture and maintain the current discriminative status quo, what the Global North (political parties, administrations, civil society agents…) should do?

The article is already publsihed here.