Rethinking Differences: Common Values and Diversity in Education

Five years of the Asia Europe Meeting's Interfaith Dialogue process to date has issued consistent calls for public and civil society organisations to identify a set of common values and to promote these values through educational cooperation between Asia and Europe. Can a set of common values bind people from different cultures in a way that could resolve, or offer more enlightened ways of interpreting and reacting to, the problematic differences? What would this catalogue of values look like? How could it be produced, accepted and propagated with due consideration to the widely differing cultural contexts of Asia and Europe? These were the core questions of a two-day dialogue retreat organised by the Asia-Europe Foundation and Casa Asia. The 16th Talks on the Hill on "The Common Denominator: Are there Universal Values for Interfaith ialogue" gathered the dual perspectives of education and interfaith experts from the two regions and was facilitated by the Research Manager of the UN Alliance of Civilizations, Dr. Thomas Uthup. A briefing from the meeting is available here.