Peculiarities Of Cultural Interaction In Education: The US Experience

Article deals with the problem of multicultural education. Ukraine, being a multicultural society, requires a new conception of the world, aimed at integrating cultures and nations, their further convergence as well as cultural enrichment. In this context the experience of many foreign countries, especially the USA, is very interesting. This country differs from average multicultural nations in a range of peculiarities, one of which is the fact that cultural interaction was not within an individual ethnos, but within immigrants–descendants of different countries, representatives of various cultures. It is underlined that the USA is the country that underwent durable trials in search for the most optimum ways to provide cultural interaction. The most modern response to the cultural diversity at the end of the 20th century in the USA became the policy of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is considered to be a democratic policy of solving the problem of cultural and social diversity in the society, which includes educational, linguistic, economic and social components and has specific mechanisms of embodiment. The interpretation of multicultural education is proposed as that one, which facilitates the formation in a person of the readiness for activities in a modern socio-cultural environment, preservation of personal identity, aspiration for respect and understanding of other cultural and ethnical communities, the ability to live in peace and harmony with representatives of various racial, ethnic, cultural, religious groups.