I decided to orient this class around the subject of diversity because it has become the number one political concern in most European countries today. I was struck by the incredible diversity of people living and working in Europe today the moment I stepped off the plane in Heathrow. I found myself in a quilt of national costumes as a cacophony of languages fell upon my ears. And, this hasn't stopped ever since. Day after day, as I walk around the Holborn/Bloomsbury/Covent Garden areas where I work, live and Sas goes to school, respectively, at least half the people I pass are speaking a foreign language, many I cannot identify. Lots of Spanish, Polish, some Chinese, many African languages I do not recognize, only occasionally Arabic or Urdu. Lots of American students as well.
My daughter's class at St. Joseph's is similarly diverse. When I pick her up from school, I'm standing in a crowd consisting of a row of council flat English moms chain-smoking and sitting on the stoop gossiping, a beautifully and colorfully dress Grandmother with African print skirt, top and baby tied on her back - all in different prints, and a smattering of other working class and neatly dressed professional moms, grandmas, grandpas, aunties and dads of every skin tone. Perhaps, I'll get brave as we go along and take some pictures.
So, it's a heck of a lot more diverse than Spokane, which is about 10% minority, and Gonzaga, about the same. I grew up mainly in suburban, overwhelmingly white communities in the mid-West and East Coast, with a lot of contact with more diverse urban environs, including going to university in Washington, DC which feels almost as diverse as London today, at least at AU where I went to school with a lot of foreign kids, including a lot from the Middle East, and teh club scene which was full of Euro-trash types and diplomats kids.
Still don't have a sense of the integration/discrimination issue. Only a comment or two here and there about "Bengali kids" and I have seen groups African kids and Bengali boys roaming the streets, yelling, looking like their up to the things most teenage boys are up to...
In terms of the European Social Model, I have benefited most clearly thus far by getting my daughter into St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School - absolutely free.
More later.
dr laura
