Bernard Gifford Paragraphs 53 to 60 in the Draft Recommendations on Minorities and the Right to Education acknowledge the importance of the curriculum as the principal means through which governmental educational agencies communicate their commitment to equality in educational opportunity. The rationale for addressing the “nuts and bolts” of education in the Draft makes a great deal of sense, from the perspective of both policy and practice. After all, without these materials, whether in the form of subject-matter frameworks, instructional objectives, lesson plans, professional development of teachers, and the multiplicity of assessments used to evaluate the progress of students, the goals in the Draft will not be met. It is through these materials that educational policies and practices sensitive to the reality of linguistic diversity, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, academically promising female learners, and the reality of the persistent failure of state-supported educational systems to acknowledge the cultural assets of all of their students will be addressed. Nevertheless, I believe that the Draft would be further strengthened it were it to include a recommendation that governmental agencies and NGOs involved in the promotion of equal educational opportunities be provided the means to share their knowledge with each other. In today’s global village, this has become necessary, if we are to achieve success in addressing the educational marginalization of people of Korean descent in Japan, Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States, African immigrants in Europe, Haitian students in the Dominican Republic, Turkish children in Germany and Greece, the Baha’i children in Iran, Kurdish students in Turkey, Black American children in the Central Cities of the United States, etc. The misconceptions that sustain such marginalization in many of these situations treat diversity as a fundamental threat to normative educational policies. Because these misconceptions transcend existing geopolitical arrangements, they should be challenged from multiple geopolitical perspectives. Therefore, the Draft should include a call for the establishment on an ongoing forum where advocates of equal educational opportunity can come together on a regular basis to discuss their successes and frustrations, their tactics and strategies, as well as their sources of inspiration to generate lessons and understandings that will transcend these geopolitical arrangements. Through alternative conceptual frameworks, the forum will create the possibility as well as the means to challenge the intellectual, scientific, and moral basis of invidious misconceptions. Instead of portrayals of diversity, pluralism, and heterogeneity that place advocates of educational opportunity in the role of supplicants and special pleaders, change agents are likely to gain significant advantage from challenging the polity to adopt new frameworks for analyzing the consequences of inequitable educational policies. Permit me to elaborate. The cost and consequences of racism and discrimination for victims is well-known, as evidenced by the heart-rending accounts we have heard in the last two days. Less widely acknowledged is that racism and xenophobia also questions the moral basis of the politics of exclusion and denigration. This was the message that secured the Nobel Peace Prize for Martin Luther King, Jr. He argued that the costs of racism and discrimination were as crippling to their architects as to their victims. Therefore, if we were to take King’s message seriously, it follows that advocates equal educational opportunity for historically subjugated minority groups should frame their demands in the language of mutual benefit. This goal cannot be achieved without a language that emphasizes the social and economic costs of racism,