1. Education must enable both individual learners and entire communities to recognise themselves within their education. This can be noticeably observed in postcolonial societies, where the gap between the formal education setting and the context (culture, community etc.) is particularly pronounced. This gap takes various forms: social representations, stereotypes, exclusion from the educational narrative, disconnect between the skills required by a community and the skills acquired through education, amongst others. A relevant instance is the use of mother tongue. A language is not only a means of communication, it is also the vehicle of ideas, values, and a community’s culture. On a social level, an education which does not embed the mother tongue of learners, in effect, severs them from their community and prohibits them from being pro-active agents within a community which they no longer understand. On the level of assessments, the exclusion of mother tongues from education places learners from minority languages into immediate disadvantage as they will simultaneously need to learn new material and a new language. The result is often a process of alienation, disconnecting the learners from their own community or leading them to retreat behind barriers leading to communitarianism;

Each learner is, first and foremost, an individual with different experiences and history. Individuals learn in different ways. It is, accordingly, important for pedagogical practices to be tailored to the learner’s individual context and realities. In other words, it is the education system that must adapt to the diversity of the student body, and not the student body to sacrifice its diversity in an attempt to adapt to the education system. This diversity is expressed in countless forms –mental and physical abilities, gender, sexual orientation, language, faith, socio-economic class, and any other relevant aspect of their social and cultural backgrounds.