Since its inception, the school has maintained a close relationship with the project of modernity and a commitment to the configuration of the corresponding type of subject. That is to say, the school, understood as the institution responsible for the formation of the type of subject necessary for the configuration of the emerging nation-states of the eighteenth century, has responded to the demands of the project of modernity. Thus, the imagination of the nation-state and of the social and political community was mainly derived from this notion of the subject promoted by the Enlightenment and the colonialist project. In other words, by contributing to the creation of an idea of what this new community should be, the school configured a type of subject that followed this idea, and vice versa, to the extent that it sought to construct a certain subjectivity and, at the same time, contributed to the construction of a convinced imaginary of political community.

As we all know, Colombia has been experiencing a social and armed conflict for more than half a century. Given this fact, it is necessary to ask what role this commitment between education and the modern subject has played in the configuration of a society crossed by a violent conflict that we have not yet been able to overcome. Therefore, it seems relevant to raise the question of the role that education has played so far in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia, especially with regard to the type of national identity and subjectivities that state policies have sought to configure through formal education, understood as a means of subjectivation.

Given that the Colombian population is ethnically and culturally heterogeneous —which implies the coexistence within the national territory of a diversity of groups with differentiated socio-cultural patterns (Moreno, 2022)— and that, to this extent, as recognized by the 1991 Constitution, Colombia is a multiethnic and multicultural country, it is extremely important to ask whether these subjectivities configured by Colombian educational policies recognize otherness as a fundamental principle of any ethical relationship and whether they are imbued with what could be called an ‘intercultural ethos’.

However, although the 1991 Constitution would imply the possibility of a displacement from a homogeneous nation paradigm to a diverse and multicultural nation paradigm (Carvajal, 2014), this has not materialized in practice. On the one hand, there is constitutional recognition of ethnic and multicultural diversity; on the other, we continue to witness acts of violence thatare generated in these communities, in many cases as a result of the armed conflict and the dispossession of their territories by transnational megaprojects (Carvajal, 2014).

According to Berche et al. (2006), Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples have denounced the ethnocide or genocide perpetrated against their populations and leaders, which threatens both the rights they have won and their political, cultural, and territorial integrity and autonomy; all of this shows that Colombia is still far from becoming a truly multicultural nation.

This paper hypothesizes that the processes of generation of subjectivities and national identities carried out by the State through the school and its educational policies have not abandoned the Eurocentric model of the colonizing subject and, as a result, have contributed to the continuity and naturalization of the rationality that feeds the conflict, instead of resisting and overcoming it. In this sense, it is proposed to address this issue from an intercultural perspective in dialogue with the Levinasian perspective of otherness. To this end, the question of cultural identity, as conceived by the modern subject, will be addressed first. Next, the question of otherness and the so-called ‘invention of the other’ is analyzed from the perspective of Latin American social sciences. Finally, it briefly examines the tools that critical intercultural thinking can offer to Colombian educational policies to promote subjectivation processes in the school that allow the configuration of an ‘intercultural ethos’.

Salas (2006) enfatiza la importancia de la utopía, argumentando que la ética se basa necesariamente en la esperanza del surgimiento de nuevos ajustes de la razón, especialmente aquellas que la razón práctica asume en situaciones de conflicto para generar las posibilidades de diálogo necesarias para la coexistencia. Ante la pregunta de la posibilidad de una vida auténticamente humana en un mundo multiétnico permeado por diversas perspectivas y valores, el autor cree que un primer paso sería identificar interculturalmente aquellos procesos que dificultan la comunicación y conducen al aislamiento solipsista de individuos y comunidades respecto a sus sistemas éticos.

Por tanto, este trabajo pretende mostrar que uno de estos procesos, quizás uno de los más importantes y decisivos, está relacionado con la producción de un cierto tipo de subjetividad resultante de la modernidad en contextos multiculturales y multiétnicos, como es el caso de los pueblos latinoamericanos.

Particularmente en Colombia, la configuración de un tipo de subjetividad política vinculada a la consolidación del colonialismo y que ignora la importante cuestión de las subjetividades emergentes parece contribuir a la consolidación del conflicto político y social que la sociedad colombiana ha experimentado durante más de medio siglo. En este sentido, se hace necesaria una perspectiva educativa decolonial, que implica un pluralismo epistemológico que conduce a una nueva forma de entender la educación en contextos multiculturales; una educación que estimule el pleno desarrollo socioeducativo de los sujetos y cuestione su trabajo asimilacionista (Muñoz, 2021).

Es importante analizar esta lógica de universalización hegemónica, descrita por Salas (2006), que parece inherente a este sujeto de la modernidad. Levinas (1982)2 la problematiza al relacionarla con una idea de totalidad, «en la que la conciencia abarca el mundo, sin dejar nada fuera, y se convierte así en un pensamiento absoluto» (p. 67). Lo que se cuestiona en esta problematización levinasiana es, en última instancia, la cuestión del sujeto. Es una crítica de esa subjetividad anclada en la metafísica del ser, en la medida en que presupone una existencia monádica, es decir, sin relación.

En este sentido, Levinas busca pensar una forma de relacionarse con el otro que rompa con el modelo del sujeto que se relaciona con el otro como si este fuera un objeto. De hecho, en términos de conocimiento, para Levinas «es una relación con aquello cuya alteridad está suspendida, con aquello que se vuelve inmanente porque está en mi medida y escala» (p. 52). Podría decirse que el principal problema derivado de la subjetividad moderna que el filósofo lituano parece identificar es el problema de la relación intersubjetiva. Así, atribuye a la subjetividad configurada bajo una lógica de totalidad la idea de una sociedad total y adicional (Levinas, 1982). Una sociedad que se construye trágicamente en una profunda ignorancia de la cuestión de la alteridad, negando así la posibilidad de reconocer subjetividades emergentes.

De lo anterior, es posible señalar algunos de los peligros de insistir en la formación de un sujeto que se ajusta al discurso de la lógica de la Ilustración, pues, en palabras de Castro-Gómez (2000), la modernidad podría ser considerada una «máquina generadora de alteridades que, en nombre de la razón y el humanismo, excluye de su imaginario la hibridez, la multiplicidad, la ambigüedad y la contingencia de las formas concretas de vida» (p. 88).

En este sentido, se pueden destacar dos aspectos del sujeto iluminista que favorecen y promueven situaciones de conflicto social, como la vivida en Colombia: primero, la subjetividad moderna es un dispositivo conceptual que rechaza y excluye la diferencia y la alteridad; segundo, como consecuencia, es un dispositivo que genera una imagen de comunidad que conduce a la imposibilidad de construir una comunidad política atravesada por la diferencia y el reconocimiento de la alteridad. Esto implica que la escuela, y especialmente la colombiana en la actual coyuntura social y política, debe repensar su ideal de sujeto para permitir la configuración de una nueva subjetividad abierta al diálogo con la diferencia.

Por lo tanto, el primer aspecto problemático que se señala en este trabajo es que la subjetividad política construida por la escuela colombiana a partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX se relacionaba con un ideal de ciudadanía que ignoraba su propia realidad social y cultural. Es decir, era una subjetividad política que no consideraba las diferencias y particularidades de los numerosos grupos sociales y culturales que habitaban Colombia. Era una subjetividad política acrítica que ignoraba la posibilidad de la disidencia política.

Según un estudio realizado por Ortega et al. (2015), durante el período comprendido entre 1964 y 2011, el marco normativo que desarrolló y definió la política educativa en Colombia mostró una falta de iniciativas y frente a la enseñanza de la historia reciente; Además, buscó la formación de una ciudadanía abstracta, ajena a las dinámicas históricas del conflicto armado interno y su impacto en la población colombiana.

Although science currently shows significant advances and achievements in the recognition of human and cultural diversity in terms of descriptive ethical constructs, the reality is that society in general seems to maintain an imaginary based on a univocal sense of the reality of nations, a perception that implies logics of social, educational, political, cultural and economic development that would assume standardized procedures for all, without questioning what would be a certain homogeneous unity among the individuals that make up a given society (Echeverry, 2021). Thus, in the Colombian case, it could be said that the type of subjectivity that Colombian educational policies have tried to form in recent decades has not been conducive to overcoming social and political conflicts, since it has not contributed to questioning and deepening the important issues of otherness and conflict inherent in living together in a multicultural context and the interaction with the other that this implies.

For Levinas, the book Le Temps et L’Autre is an attempt to escape the isolation that ontologyimposes on the subject. According to the author himself, his effort in this book is to show that knowledge cannot be considered as an authentic exit from the world, since in reality it is an immanence in which the other becomes thematic and is considered as a known object (Levinas, 1982). For the Lithuanian philosopher, knowledge is nothing more than a form of relationship «with that whose otherness is suspended» (p. 52), because it is embraced and becomes immanent and, and therefore, according to him, knowledge can always be interpreted as assimilation. More precisely, Esterman (2009) refers to ‘assimilation’ as a colonial and neocolonial strategy that seeks to subsume the other under a hegemonic and monocultural project that ends up annihilating otherness. Through this strategy, the Other must conform to the standards of European humanity in order to become part of universal humanity.

In this sense, “only he who could adapt to the Semitic-Greek ideal of the adult Indo-Germanic white male scholar could be called fully ‘human’” (Esterman, 2009, p. 62). Furthermore, the author reminds us that «this Western ideal of the ‘human’, dominates to this day what is considered the ‘humanities’ and mental schemas of superiority and whiteness» (p. 62). It is essential to take this last aspect into account since the humanities will be the fundamental tool that the school will use to teach and reproduce the schemas mentioned above.

The American social philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein (as cited in Castro-Gómez, 2000) showed that the humanities and social sciences had become a fundamental element in the formation of nation-states. According to him, the emergence of the social sciences was not simply an additive phenomenon to the processes of political organization required by the nationstate, but a constitutive phenomenon of those very processes. In other words, the modern state needed a window of scientific observation of the social world it sought to govern. It was precisely through the social sciences that the incipient nation-state could establish collective goals, build a cultural identity, and assign it to its citizens.

Thus, according to Castro-Gómez (2000), the knowledge provided by the social sciences defined and legitimized the norms that made it possible to link citizens to the production processes inherent to the ‘modernization’ of the new states. And, in turn, this attempt to create forms of subjectivity coordinated by the state gave rise to what the Colombian author calls the ‘invention of the other’.

This ‘invention’ refers to the knowledge/power devices out of which representations of others are constructed. It is a process of material and symbolic production in which Western societies have been engaged since the sixteenth century (Castro-Gómez, 2000). According to CastroGómez (2000), the social sciences gave scientific legitimacy to the regulatory policies of the state and favored those processes of material and symbolic production through which cultural identities were consolidated; but the representation of one’s own cultural identity was constructed on the basis of, and in contrast to, the representation of an ‘abject other’.

As Castro-Gómez said, the social sciences have been imbued from the outset with a Eurocentric imaginary that leads them to present the process of rationalization as the result of the development of qualities inherent to Western societies. Thus, according to Fornet-Betancourt (2004), the constellation of knowledge in which we move today is fundamentally a product of the West; it contains a guideline that prescribes what the different disciplinary fields must know in order to configure the reality of the West.

The phenomenon of colonialism would have meant the beginning of a tortuous but inevitable path of development and modernization for the Latin American peoples, to mention just one example. Paradoxically, these peoples had to follow this path in order to distance themselves from this ‘abject other’ as they saw themselves. As we have seen, according to Fornet-Betancourt (2004) and Castro Gómez (2000), this colonial imaginary has traditionally been reproduced by the social sciences and philosophy, even in Latin American societies. According to them, not only has the colonial imaginary permeated the socialsciences since their inception, but they have never made an epistemological break with it.

But how does the invention of the other work in this imaginary? Well, the human species would have gone through different stages of perfection until it reached the maturity that European societies would have reached. Therefore, Latin American indigenous societies would represent the lowest stage in the scale of human development. The last stage of this development, represented by European societies, is constructed as the absolute opposite of the first and in contrast to them. In this way, the analytical models of the social sciences are impregnated with binary concepts such as barbarism and civilization, tradition and modernity, poverty and development, etc.

Castro-Gómez (2000) concludes that the social sciences structurally functioned as an ideological apparatus that legitimized the exclusion and discipline of those people who did not fit the subjectivity profiles that the state needed to implement its modernization policies. Thus, the Constitution of 1886 said nothing about the reality of the peoples who inhabited the national territory and who, despite countless vicissitudes, played a fundamental role in the formation of the nascent republic. However, they were legally ‘non-existent’, although they did not cease to exist as a labor force or as a reserve for armies and indoctrinators (Rojas, 2019).

The Colombian authors Herrera et al. (2003) analyzed the imaginaries constructed by social science textbooks in the first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. According to them, the national identity presented in these texts was a model imposed by the Colombian elites, referring to an ideal citizen who was unaware of his or her own social and cultural reality and who was guided by doctrinaire and closed instruments whose written structure did not allow questioning the existing social order. In other words, the process of constructing national identity was directly articulated with the construction of the political project of the nationstate, understood as a project of the elites, whichwould have left aside cultural diversity and the plurality of cultural and political expressions in the country, making these expressions invisible and silencing them.

Thus, the process of transformation of social science education in Colombia, which cannot be described in detail here, functions as a body of knowledge traversed by multiple demands and the actions of numerous actors. According to the aforementioned authors, the conflictive character of this tradition implies the recognition of defeated and invisible perspectives and values: the perspectives and values of emerging subjectivities.

Education in Colombia would have been particularly focused on the formation of nationalist subjects with a high sense of civic and moral responsibility, competitive, and productive, according to the imperatives of the global capitalist economic and political context (Ortega et al., 2015). The problem is that this model of citizenship ignored the social reality of peasants, blacks, indigenous peoples and, in general, the so-called ethnic minorities, resulting in the configuration of a type of subjectivity that ignored the historical and political causes of the country’s internal armed conflict. In this way, the reality of the conflict was dangerously simplified, and the imaginary of community implied the elimination of differences and the normalization of what was different.

In light of the panorama described above, it seems appropriate to raise the question of how to think through education, the construction of a political community that, in a context of conflict such as the Colombian one, is capable of dealing constructively with the enormous cultural, social, and political diversity and plurality of the country. The problem is that as long as Colombian education is unable to problematize with sufficient radicalism the kind of subjectivity that seems to dominate educational discourses and practices and that, as has been shown,derives from the Eurocentric hegemonic project of modernity, the construction of a community capable of overcoming the social and political conflict that afflicts the country seems to be a task doomed to failure. From a Levinasian perspective, the problem lies in the impossibility of thinking sociality from the ontology of the modern subject. For Levinas (1982), it is clear that «the social is beyond ontology» (p. 50).

For Levinas (1982), the sphere of commonality that any synthesis presupposes is not present in the relations between human beings; therefore, the Lithuanian philosopher tries to conceive a sociality different from what he calls ‘total and additional sociality’. The latter derives from the ontology of the modern subject and allows us to speak of an objectified society permeated by a supposed common element «by which man resembles things and is individualized as a thing» (p. 70).

In particular, the total and additional society that Levinas questions, which is related to our conventional notion of society, seems to start from the assumption that the principle of a sociality that would be originally conflictive must be limited. On the basis of this conception, the Western paradigm of civilization seeks to solve the problem of the sociality of nationstates by eliminating differences and everything that represents a possibility of dissent. To achieve this, the project of European modernity implements the strategy of incorporation, which, according to Esterman (2009), constitutes the final act of the elimination of otherness, whose main variant would be the practice of inclusion.

This practice, according to the author, is based on a fundamental premise of asymmetry and domination, in which an active subject is assumed to be included and a passive object to be included: «The goal of this process is a society based on an exogenous project of ‘development’, ‘civilization’, and ‘welfare’, currently translated in terms of ‘modernity’, ‘technology’, ‘participation’, and ‘consumption’» (Esterman, 2009, p. 63). In other words, it is included to impose a project and a vision of the world, so that no one is left out of thisimposed order. It is included, ultimately, to deny difference and otherness and to configure sociality according to the logic of totality.

An example of this inclusion in current law, according to the author, is the concept of citizenship, which often becomes an instrument of exclusion in the legal framework. In fact, he states that «in the nation-states, the concept of citizenship is used as an instrument of exclusion; it is rather a means of institutionalizing exclusion» (Fornet-Betancourt, 2004, p. 48). In other words, the strategy of incorporation and inclusion that operates in the concept of citizenship is nothing more than the subtle imposition of a hegemonic project that ends up denying otherness. It could be said that the acquisition of citizenship becomes a filter through which only people whose profile fits the requirements of the Enlightenment project can pass: male, white, Catholic, property-owning, educated, and heterosexual. Therefore, those individuals who do not fit this profile, that is, what Ricardo Salas (2006) calls ‘emerging subjectivities’ -women, blacks, indigenous people, illiterates, homosexuals, etc.- would remain in the sphere of illegality, under the surveillance and punishment of the law that excludes them.

As Castro-Gómez (2000) points out, pedagogy would be responsible for materializing this desirable type of modern subjectivity, and thus the school became the place where the type of subject required by the regulatory ideals of the constitutions was formed. It was there that children were to acquire the knowledge, skills, values, and cultural models that would enablethem to play a productive role in society. In this way, the school taught how to be a ‘good citizen’, but not how to be a good peasant, a good native, or a good black, since all of these human types were considered part of the sphere of barbarism.

Fornet-Betancourt (2004) criticizes education as an instrument of the nation-state because it is incapable of dealing with Latin America’s diversity; he considers it important to «hold ourselves accountable for the damage caused by the nation-state, with its homogeneous way of educating for a uniform life that ignores the diversity of historical memories of this continent» (p. 50). In fact, the educational system not only coordinates knowledge, but also acts as a filter and a mechanism of exclusion of other knowledge. In this way, «the educational system is in reality the knowledge apparatus through and by which the members of the elite of a given cultural, political, etc., community tell the members of that society what they should learn» (pp. 21-22).

It could be said that the process of inventing citizenship and the process of inventing the other are genetically related, in that the creation of the identity of the modern Latin American citizen implies the creation of a counterpart from which this identity could be affirmed. Thus, paradoxically, the creation of the Latin American citizen implies a process of exclusion and denial of difference and otherness, resulting in what we could call the impossibility of community. That is, by denying, in the name of an ideal or imagined community, the plurality of expressions that would make possible a ‘factual’ community, that is, a community that does not deny conflict as something inherent to itself, the very possibility of community is denied. In this sense, Fornet-Betancourt (2004) invites us to consider, from an intercultural perspective, that dissent is at the heart of the social biography of a culture:

[It is important] to suspect that the image that a culture currently presents to us is an image that is supported by the consensus of the totality of its members. We can and should assume that there has always been someonewho has protested, and the problem, of course, is how a culture treats the minority that produces dissent. (p. 31)

In the same vein, Salas (2006) argues that ours is a polycentric society that increasingly allows for cultural heterogeneity. This cultural diversity, in turn, «is not problematic if one assumes that human life is intimately bound up with conflict» (p. 26). It is not a question of affirming that the identity logic of the modern subject is the only and true cause of the internal social and armed conflict in Colombia, but it is possible to think that this logic is at the root of the problem and that it favors it. The idea of peace, according to this logic, would have to do with the absence of all conflict: a kind of earthly paradise in which dissent disappears and all differences are leveled under the figure of an ideal national identity.

But how can a culture of peace be built in a social and cultural reality based on the nonrecognition of difference and otherness? From the logic of identity derived from modernity, it seems that the conflict inherent in the configuration of any community is a problem that must be solved by eliminating differences, if necessary violently (Grupo Memoria Histórica [GMH], 2013). Moreover, in the name of an ideal of community, not only does it seek to eliminate the conflict that results from the coexistence of differences by denying and destroying them, but, above all, through the school, it seems to promote ignorance of this violence and, therefore, of the greater polemic that results from this dangerous solution.

Thus, the aforementioned study by Ortega et al. (2015), after a documentary review of the Colombian regulatory framework between 1964 and 2011, highlights the absence of initiatives and proposals related to the teaching of the recent history of violent conflict in Colombia. On the contrary, the teaching of history in particular and social sciences in general has been diluted in an education based on abstract citizenship skills, far from the historical dynamics of the internal armed conflict and its impact on the population. These authors even affirm that during this period, the internal social, political and armed conflict,as well as its causes, actors and dynamics, were not mentioned under any name. As a result, they are deprived of a pedagogical approach by the national education policy. According to Colombian researchers, education in Colombia has been instrumentalized to construct a type of subjectivity that corresponds to the perspectives and interests of one of the actors in the conflict: the economic and political elites with their hegemonic nation-state projects.

In the world and, of course, in Latin America, there has been a remarkable interest in directing educational reforms towards more diverse curricula that allow the inclusion of the different types of subjects that make up societies (Muñoz and Saiz, 2022). Thus, since the approval of the 1991 Constitution, national governments have made significant efforts to promote dialogue with these communities and to influence educational policies aimed at interculturality and the training of ethno-educators (Moreno, 2022).

The multicultural model and the holistic model became key aspects in the generation of intervention strategies in school spaces intersected by cultural diversity (Castro, 2019). In addition, it began to be recognized that the quality of education goes beyond the economic investment in the education sector. Therefore, the training of teachers in inclusive and intercultural processes is necessary if the school is to become an emancipatory space where the confluence of plural and democratic positions is possible (Lalinde and Arroyave, 2022). However, although the education of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples appears in the planning horizon of the Colombian state, this horizon does not cease to adapt to the logics of development and, as a result, there are often encounters and disagreements between the visions of the communities regarding the management of their institutions and national educational policies (Moreno, 2022).

As Rojas (2019) states, «it is one thing to name cultural diversity as a fact of reality and quite another to assume it» (p. 18). This means understanding that it is the result of a social and historical process and, as such, does not escape the enormous variety of cultural representations that exist around diversity and what it implies. Thus, it would be necessary to problematize the rapid transition from a «dominant hegemonic society» to «coexistence on equal terms and with mutual respect», as if in eight years Colombian society had magically eliminated the conditions of inferiority, subordination, and marginalization to which the ‘indigenous’ and ‘Afro-Colombian’ minorities are subjected.

In addition, the fact that so-called intercultural education has been proposed exclusively for ‘ethnic groups’, for which ‘ethno-education’ has been formulated, should be problematized. So far, it has been assumed that intercultural education is only for indigenous or minority groups. However, since the Constitution (1991) clearly recognizes the multicultural character of the country, education should be in line with these postulates: «This means that intercultural education should be offered to all Colombians, whether they belong to a minority group or not» (Rojas, 1999, p. 57).

This implies aiming at the formation of a type of subjectivity that leads to the construction of what could be called a multicultural society, to allude to the diversity of cultures that seek to solve similar individual needs within a society; to do so, they should have the same opportunities (ÁvilaDávalos, 2022). The fundamental challenge of such societies would be the inclusion of minority groups and the recognition of their identity (Guzmán-Marín, 2018; Rodríguez, 2020), for which it is necessary to form a society of subjects open to this recognition.

In the reflections that Fornet-Betancourt (2004) offers on the concept of interculturality, he poses the following question: «What does pedagogy mean, what does it mean to teach in the context of a society that does not want to be reductionist and accepts different educational processes» (p. 48). Much of theanswer has to do with the central problem that, according to the author, interculturality poses: not only recognizing diversity on a theoretical level, but also recognizing the right to ‘make the world differently’.

Here, the question of the ideal of education must be considered: «What ideal of education is behind what we teach, what is ultimately important: to preserve this knowledge or to achieve a society made up of people who really make their lives» (Fornet-Betancourt, 2004, p. 49). These are questions that, posed from a concern for the configuration of an intercultural world, help to broaden the horizon to rethink the ideal of what we want to teach. And, as has been explained throughout this text, the broadening of this horizon must necessarily imply the problematization of the type of subjectivity that the school forms, especially, but not exclusively, in conflictual contexts such as the Colombian one.

In this context, it is necessary to consider other ways of thinking about subjectivity that allow for the configuration of another form of sociality, different from the ‘additional and total’ sociality that Levinas problematizes. In this way, it seems necessary to begin to take much more seriously the possibility of a subject configured on the basis of openness to otherness and the recognition of difference.

Similarly, Salas (2006) argues that interculturality implies a new awareness that all cultures are in the process of gestating their own universes of meaning and that the absolute subordination of the other to my own system of interpreting reality is not really possible. According to this author, interculturality introduces a discussion that must of course be considered in education: the forms of recognition of cultural identities and the mutual recognition of cultures that have lived in asymmetry throughout history.

For Salas (2006), the notion of interculturality is fundamentally ethical and points to a new space that must be constructed to coexist. As the author warns, this new space cannot be conceived as something that is always accepted by all, since there are divergent interests both insideand outside the world of life, but the process of mutual recognition can lead to the creation of a new relationship between oneself and the other: «a relationship that, although currently asymmetrical, can give rise to symmetrical relationships in which the in-communication and excommunication that currently exist can be overcome for the sake of a new exercise of intercultural dialogue» (pp. 81-82).

The school must stop being seen as an instrument of a colonizing project associated with modernity and begin to be seen as one of the fundamental vehicles of polycentric societies, such as Colombian society, for the construction of this new space that allows the generation of common paths of recognition, «if we want to avoid falling into the abyss of fundamentalism and cultural closure that leads to the exclusion of the other» (Salas, 2006, p. 82).

However, according to Esterman (2009), the discourse of interculturality ceases to be simply an intentional and interpersonal discourse if it is not imbued with a critical reflection on the process of decolonization; he points out that this process is not limited to simply eradicating all traces of colonial power from a culture, since critical intercultural philosophy considers that all cultures are the result of a complex process of ‘inter-trans-culturation’ and rejects any notion of cultural purism. For the author, the perspective of profound decolonization implies becoming aware of the coloniality of structures, power relations, values, internalizations, mental schemes, and legal systems.

Therefore, from Esterman’s (2009) perspective, critical intercultural thinking must start from the «recognition of an asymmetry between cultures, of the hegemony of certain cultures over others [...], of power relations within cultures, and of the asymmetry of gender relations within and between cultures» (pp. 63- 64). Thus, the school, in order not to become a mere tool of this hegemonic power and of this dominant culture, has the responsibility of being the space par excellence where the recognition of the situation of power and asymmetry of a given culture takes place.

On the other hand, the recognition of asymmetries and power relations within cultures implies the need to face the conflict inherent in the processes of cultural and social configuration and transformation. In this sense, Salas (2006) highlights the relevance of the notion of conflict as a fundamental category in intercultural reflection. Nevertheless, the idea of conflict he proposes does not refer to the bipolar logic of class society, but to a reality inherent to human societies, related to a dynamic process of agreements and disagreements that occur at different levels of deliberation and human coexistence, whose socio-political implications must be recognized.

In his theory, conflict appears as a constitutive element of intercultural dialogue and, in this sense, it must be understood as an intrinsic element of a contextualized action; thus, with regard to the situation of Latin America, Salas emphasizes that, according to Kusch, «one could say that the problem of America is, in part, that of tolerating, if possible, different rationalities, perhaps to find a rationality that is deeper or better, closer to our conflicts» (p. 33); therefore, the configuration of an intercultural ethos, for Salas, implies a theory of conflicts that is built through the search for common spaces of self and hetero-recognition within the cultural context itself, but also outside of it; that is, in contact with other cultures.

Levinas’ reflections seem to show other ways of thinking about subjectivity. Levinas (1982) questions modern subjectivity and proposes a plural subjectivity, a subjectivity that includes the other because it is constructed on the basis of sociality: «It is in ethics, understood as responsibility, that the knot of the subjective is given» (p. 87). This subjectivity traversed by otherness seems to be the fundamental principle of a critical intercultural understanding. It rejects, according to Esterman (2009), any essentialism or cultural purism and defends that all cultures are the result of a complex and long process of ‘inter-trans-culturation’.

In intercultural thinking, culture, like the Levinasian subject, is traversed by otherness, by dialogue with other cultures. The relationship between cultures is prior to any idea of an uncontaminated cultural essence. This means that there is no state prior to culture, but that each culture in its present state is the result of innumerable processes of dialogue and interaction with different traditions (inter) and historical transformations (trans) within the same culture (Esterman, 2009).

Consequently, thinking about intercultural education in a context of political and social conflict such as the Colombian one seems to be an important task. This task must begin by questioning the single paradigm of Eurocentric rational subjectivity and begin to observe these opaque, singular, and diverse subjects that interact in everyday life.

Thinking about education from an intercultural perspective would mean considering that education must be pluralized and that it is necessary to abandon the idea that it is an instrument of national states and a producer of a more or less homogeneous nation. An intercultural pedagogy should begin by broadening our vision of ourselves and taking responsibility for who we are. This implies, of course, taking responsibility for educational policies with the aim of building a society in which the voices of others, of those who are different, of those who have not been heard or recognized, are heard.

The author of this article declares that he has no conflict of interest in the work presented.

Ávila-Dávalos, H. (2022). Multiculturalidad e interculturalidad: el papel de la educación superior para generación de competencias interculturales para el contexto organizacional [Multiculturalism and interculturalism: the role of higher education in the generation of intercultural competencies for the organizational context]. Educación y Humanismo, 24(43), 13-34. https://doi.org/10.17081/eduhum.24.43.4838

Berche, S., García, M. y Mantilla, A. (2006). Los derechos indígenas en Colombia: textos y jurisprudencia constitucionales. En L. Navas (Ed.), Los derechos en nuestra propia voz. Pueblos indígenas y DESC: una lectura intercultural Pueblos indígenas y DESC: una lectura intercultural] (págs. 61-81). Instituto Latinoamericano para una Sociedad y un Derecho Alternativo.

Carvajal, D. (2014). Violencia y Nación en Colombia: de la Nación homogénea a la Nación multicultural [Violence and Nation in Colombia: from the homogeneous Nation to the multicultural Nation]. Revista Eleuthera, 11, 101-126.

Castro, C. (2019). Los modelos de educación multicultural e intercultural. Una revisión necesaria desde una sociedad diversa [Models of multicultural and intercultural education. A necessary review from a diverse society]. Revista Amauta, 17(33), 87-104. http://dx.doi.org/10.15648/am.33.2019.7

Castro-Gómez, S. (2000). Ciencias sociales, violencia epistémica y el problema de la invención del otro. La colonialidad del saber, eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, 88-99. CLACSO.

Echeverry, L. M. (2021). Diversidad e interculturalidad: dos perspectivas en la educación actual [Diversity and interculturality: two perspectives in education today]. Cuadernos Pedagógicos, 23(32), 55-61.

Esterman, J. (2009). Colonialidad, descolonización e interculturalidad: apuntes desde la filosofía intercultural [Coloniality, decolonization and interculturality: notes from intercultural philosophy]. In S. Ploskonka & J. Obando (Eds.), Interculturalidad crítica y descolonización: fundamentos para el debate [Critical interculturality and decolonization: foundations for debate] (pp. 51-70). Instituto Internacional de Integración del Convenio Andrés Bello (III-CAB). http://www.enlazandoculturas.cicbata.org/sites/default/files/MAPEP/david_mora.pdf

Fornet-Betancourt, R. (2004). Reflexiones de Raúl Fornet-Betancourt sobre el concepto de interculturalidad. Consorcio intercultural.

Grupo de Memoria Histórica (GMH). (2013). ¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memorias de guerra y dignidad [Enough is enough! Colombia: Memories of war and dignity]. Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica.

Guzmán-Marín, F. (2018). Los retos de la educación intercultural en el siglo XXI [The challenges of intercultural education in the 21st century]. Revista latinoamericana de educación inclusiva, 12(1), 199- 212. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-73782018000100199

Herrera, M., Pinilla, A. y Suaza, L. (2003). La identidad nacional en los textos escolares de ciencias sociales. Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.

Lalinde, A. F. & Arroyave, D. I. (2022). Tras los desafíos de una educación intercultural en Colombia [Following the challenges of intercultural education in Colombia]. Índice, Revista de Educación de Nicaragua, 2(4), 99–114. https://revistaindice.cnu.edu.ni/index.php/indice/article/view/119

Levinas, E. (1982). Ética e infinito. Ediciones 70.

Moreno, Y. (2022). Educación e Interculturalidad: Propuesta desde los pueblos étnicoterritoriales reconocidos desde 1991 en Colombia [Education and Interculturality: Proposal from the ethnic-territorial peoples recognized since 1991 in Colombia]. Novum Jus, 16(1), 187-208. https://doi.org/10.14718/NovumJus.2022.16.1.8

Muñoz, G. (2021). Educación familiar e intercultural en contexto mapuche: hacia una articulación educativa en perspectiva decolonial [Family and intercultural education in a Mapuche context: towards an educational articulation in a decolonial perspective]. Estudios Pedagógicos, 47(1), 391-407. http://dx.doi.org/10.4067/S0718-07052021000100391

Muñoz, LP & Saiz, ML (2022). El multiculturalismo y los desafíos de la educación en Colombia. Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política, (21), 39-59. https://doi.org/10.1344/oxi.2022.i21.39439

Ortega, P., Castro, C., Merchán, J., & Vélez, G. (2015). Pedagogía de la memoria para un país amnésico [Pedagogy of memory for an amnesiac country]. Universidad Pedagógica Nacional.

Rodríguez, M. O. (2020). Identidad, cultura y etnicidad: Una aproximación teórica. Apuntes acerca de la problemática sociocultural e identitaria de los latinos en Estados Unidos [Identity, culture and ethnicity: A theoretical approach. Notes on the sociocultural and identity issues of Latinos in the United States]. Novedades en Población, 16(32), 158-189. https://revistas.uh.cu/novpob/article/view/459

Rojas, T. (2019). Una mirada a los procesos en torno a la educación con los pueblos indígenas en Colombia [A look at the processes surrounding education with indigenous peoples in Colombia]. Voces y Silencios. Revista Latinoamericana de Educación, 10(1), 9–34. https://doi.org/10.18175/vys10.1.2019.03

Salas, R. (2006). Ética intercultural. Ensayos de una ética discursiva para contextos culturales conflictivos. (Re)lecturas del pensamiento latinoamericano [Intercultural ethics. Essays of a discursive ethics for conflicting cultural contexts. (Re)readings of Latin American thought]. Abya-Yala.

The author prepared, read and approved the manuscript.