| Sumario: | A commentary on Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal's “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” which appeared in Social Research, vol. 61, 1994, pp. 491-506. The writer contends that the educational program essential to a pluralistic democratic liberal state does not rest on the individual or collective right to the preservation of culture and that a detailed cosmopolitan education is an absolute necessity for the vitality of a genuinely democratic state. The writer asserts that when the state undertakes its educational obligation to provide a rich account of the history, beliefs, and practices of its constituent and neighboring cultures, it undertakes to analyze their dynamic diversity without any misleading essentialist assumptions, but if it undertakes to assist in the preservation of a minority culture, it becomes a participant in the combat over politically charged issues: the closure on cultural essentialism.
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