THE MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION DEBATE
Contrary to popular belief, there is
more than one way of looking at history.
- JOSEPH
BRUCHAC
The introduction of multiculturalism into the education system has fueled a nationwide debate in recent years. The multicultural approach to education teaches students from a cross-cultural perspective rather than from a traditionally Eurocentric view. By seeking to include the histories and traditions of the many cultures that comprise the American nation, multicultural education allows students of all ethnic backgrounds to take pride in their heritage. Non-white school children have traditionally suffered from lower grades than white children, which is now believed to be a result of the Eurocentric education system in America. When their histories are omitted or misrepresented in history textbooks, non-white children do not enjoy learning and suffer from low self-esteem, which leads to lower achievement levels in school. Educators are now realizing the importance of a multicultural education in order for education to benefit the multitude of ethnic backgrounds of America's school children.
Many people are threatened by multiculturalism. Like every social movement, it has its left and right extremes. The right extreme, or the canon conservatives, seek to save the cultural heritage of Western civilization. The left extreme, the militant multiculturalists, place emphasis on separate ethnic and racial histories. The liberals criticize the conservative view for trying to maintain the status quo. The conservatives argue that the liberal view promotes fragmentation and segregation. The extremist zealots, however, are the minority, as they are in most social movements. The majority of scholars believe it is possible to achieve a balance between the two arguments and design a multicultural curriculum that sensitizes school children to all cultures and makes all children feel good about their ancestors, without destroying the "American" identity.
The debate over multiculturalism, however, has been fueled by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, and articles appearing in such mainstream magazines as Time, warning against the "fraying of America." Schlesinger's book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society was recently a national best seller. "When multicultural education means telling our children about other races, other cultures, other continents, it is a salutary development," Schlesinger writes. Then he continues, "But when multiculturalism means that we must discard the idea of common culture and celebrate, reinforce and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities, then multiculturalism not only betrays history but undermines the theory of America as one people" (13-14). While this danger may exist, discarding a common identity is not the basic premise of multiculturalism. The discussion over the dangers of multiculturalism "has generated more heat then light, possibly because many of the opponents do not deal on a daily basis with the reality of curriculum revision in America in the 1990s" (Reeves 56). Multicultural education teaches students to appreciate all of the many backgrounds from which Americans have come, so they can better appreciate what it means to be American.
Another opponent of multiculturalism who has received media attention for his book, Dictatorship of Virtue, is Richard Bernstein, a New York Times reporter. His book was recently reviewed by Bill Bigelow, a curriculum writer and a high school history teacher who is active in the multicultural education area. Bigelow was the coordinator of several projects addressing the treatment of Columbus in the classroom during the Quincentenary. Currently, Bigelow is an editorial associate of Rethinking Schools, an independent journal that is written by teachers for teachers, parents, and students, and strives to promote educational equality and support multicultural/anti-racist education. Bigelow's article, "Dictatorship of Conservatives," critiques Bernstein's attack on multiculturalism:
Bernstein's 350-page polemic is a call to overthrow these "forces of politicization in education" and return to a tradition where merit is duly rewarded and achievements of the Great White Men once again sit in center stage. The book has been getting media attention lately and will contribute to the growing backlash against multicultural curriculum reform-a backlash that is sure to gather momentum as we enter the era of Newt, Jesse, and Orrin. . . . Undoubtedly, his book will be useful to right-wing ideologues, but it may also trouble well-meaning teachers, parents, and policymakers. (18)
Like Schlesinger, Bernstein is uninterested in exposing our school children to any facts that might disrupt his vision of America as the great unified nation. "Bernstein's United States is the freest, richest, greatest place on the planet," Bigelow says, but "He offers no evidence or arguments to support this rosy no-problems-here social vision; for Bernstein, the fundamental rightness of our society is an article of faith" (18). Bigelow sums up Bernstein's attack: "A vast understatement of U.S. injustice is an essential underpinning of his critique of multiculturalism. He refused to examine the extent to which a lopsided U.S. prosperity has been paid for with the lives of people who never benefited from that prosperity: Native Americans, African American, Latinos. . ." (18). Bernstein, and other canon conservatives, would have educators ignore, rather than deal with, the less noble aspects of American society- those that show that all Americans are not benefiting from the conservatives' version of the perfect America.
To pretend that all Americans are culturally analogous does more harm than good. Just as the glorification of Columbus has caused a backlash against the Columbus myth, the effort to make all Americans the same is what fuels the fire of militant multiculturalists. Trying to deny people their culture either forces them into a shell of inferiority, or it causes them to reject the mainstream culture and immerse themselves in the culture that they are being denied. People naturally tend to congregate with others of the same cultural background and beliefs, so to expect people to give up their cultural uniqueness in favor of a generic "American" identity is impractical. This does not mean that we are not all Americans, but that we need to redefine the term "American."
Schlesinger's views are not shared by proponents of multiculturalism. One proponent who is attempting to redefine the term "American" is David Mayberry-Lewis. In his article "Indians in the Americas: A Shameful History, A Modest Proposal," he argues that one reason many people fear multiculturalism is because they believe it causes interethnic conflict. We see this kind of conflict raging in other countries, but anti-multiculturalists believe that the United States has avoided it because of our melting-pot tradition. Mayberry-Lewis argues that it is important to view world violence in context. The United States has an extraordinarily high level of interpersonal violence, while Canada, an ethnically divided nation-the kind the conservatives would have the United States avoid at all cost-has a much lower level of interpersonal violence. "I think we tend to idealize the peace and social order maintained by the unitary state and to exaggerate the danger to this vision presented by permitting cultural distinctiveness or local autonomy to indigenous peoples or ethnic groups," Mayberry-Lewis says. "In fact, much of the violence in the world today comes from the suppression (or attempted suppression) of ethnicity in the name of the unitary state" (511). Mayberry-Lewis backs up this statement with the results of a survey conducted by the group Cultural Survival which revealed that 90 of the 120 shooting wars that were going in the world involved states that were attempting to suppress ethnic minorities. Thus, the melting-pot tradition may be the heart of the problem.
The traditional idea of America as a "melting-pot" is giving way to new analogies. One of the currently used textbooks, A More Perfect Union, offered the following:
For many years, America was called the "melting pot," the country where the customs of new arrivals melted down and blended into one American culture. Many now believe this view is outdated. The United States is not made of one culture; it is made of many. Today, many people compare the United States to a salad bowl. Like a salad, the United States is made of many different "ingredients" of peoples and cultures. Although they are mixed together, these various ingredients remain separate. Just as each component in a salad bowl yields a separate taste, each cultural contribution adds to the variety and diversity of American life. (572)
The melting-pot analogy grew out of the theory of assimilation, the premise that all Americans should embrace the dominant "white culture." A More Perfect Union also discusses assimilation:
Assimilation, or the process of taking on the language, customs, and viewpoints of another culture, is a gradual process. Assimilation is largely a matter of choice. As you read in Chapter 14, the U.S. government had little success when it tried to force the ways of white society on the American Indians. (572)
Despite the recognition that in practice the concept of assimilation has failed, it still dominates our society. Consider some of our national holidays. The Eurocentric basis for Columbus Day and Thanksgiving has already been discussed. In addition, the Fourth of July is celebrated, the anniversary of independence from Britain. Independence for whom? The European settlers. This is another holiday that many Native Americans do not celebrate. Christmas is a Christian holiday, yet there are no national holidays celebrating other religions. This is a problem for school children who want to celebrate a non-Christian religious holiday. Although Hanukkah and Kwanza are beginning to be used in tandem with Christmas, holidays related to less prominent religions, whose celebrations occur at times of the year other than late December, continue to go unrecognized. Native American school children who wish to acknowledge a religious holiday have to skip one or more days of school, or they cannot celebrate the holiday.
America's tributes to its heroes demonstrates that Eurocentrism is still a component of America society. The largest monuments in the Nation's capital house statues of Lincoln and Jefferson. One of the currently used textbooks has a picture of Mount Rushmore on the cover, 60-foot-high profiles of four white men forever ingrained 500 feet up the side of a mountain. It adds insult to injury for Native Americans that the monument is located in the heart of the Black Hills, once their sacred grounds, now teeming with tourists.
Some argue that the addition of minority figures to the American story is not enough in terms of textbook content, for the traditional heroes still loom larger than life over the rest. "These little heroes provide cultural diversity along the way to lessen the impression that American history is a white male American pageant," says Larry Dunn, in his article "Teaching the Heroes of American History." Dunn continues:
The search for women and minority role models is fine, but it is not enough, because the amount of material available on the little heroes' lives and actions does not allow students to probe the depths and heights of their heritage... where is the courage in American educational systems to probe the full meanings of our superheroes, controversial figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.?
. . . .
America does have heroes who can stand scrutiny and still emerge as powerful as those in the old myths. And these American heroes will become more enduring because their grandeur will not be based upon twisted truths.
. . . .
Perfection is not a prerequisite for heroism. (27-29)
Debunking the myths surrounding American heroes requires, like every other aspect of multicultural education, achieving a balance between representations of the glorified and the ignored. Educators should not put traditional heroes on a pedestal, nor should they romanticize forgotten heroes as the "remedy" to Ethnocentrism. Simply put, educators just need to tell it like it is.
Schlesinger devoted his entire book to the danger of losing the American identity, emphasizing the negative aspect of multiculturalism, when a lot more good could have come from emphasizing the many positive aspects. The Time magazine article stated, "European man, once the hero of the conquest of the Americas, now becomes its demon; and the victims, who cannot be brought back to life, are sanctified" (Hughes 48). The demonizing of the European invaders is a backlash against the system that has made heroes of the invaders and ignored the victims, in order to make the ancestors of the invaders feel better. History has been told by "the winners" and reflects their point of view, their concepts of who and what in American history is important. The very fact that they are portrayed as "the winners" reveals that their version of history distorts the truth in order to present Western civilization as preeminent. As Napoleon Bonaparte said, "History is a set of lies agreed upon" (Wright 3). The advent of multiculturalism has exposed the lies of history, and that makes "the winners" uncomfortable.
This ruckus over the danger of multiculturalism that has emerged from the multicultural debate serves only to turn Americans against multiculturalism as a whole. Robert Royal chides concern over the Eurocentrism in America in his book 1492 And All That: Political Manipulations of History, and he states that multiculturalism means that "the study of dead white males must give way to the study of other cultures and their distinguished members" (89). Contrary to Royal's assertion, multiculturalism does not seek to replace the teachings of Western civilization. There is no chance that our Eurocentric curriculum would do a complete about-face and swing from the far right to the far left. However, there are enough people involved in the process of designing a multicultural curriculum that it is possible to reach a balance. This was recently illustrated when the first national standards for teaching history, unveiled in November of 1994, were challenged by some prominent conservatives. A Washington Post article, dated January 14, 1995, said that leaders of the project "agreed to examine whether some of their recommendations show liberal bias, slight well-known American figures or marginalize Western civilization" (A12). The standards consist of a comprehensive set of voluntary guidelines for teachers to use in history classes that were created by about three dozen national education groups. They offer about 2,600 examples of assignments, for kindergarten through the 12th grade, that teachers could consider giving students. Most of the examples have been welcomed. Criticism has focused on a few dozen of the suggestions, "rather than the more broadly defined goals of the project" (A12). One of the examples cited in the Post article is the suggestion that students "analyze the effects of the fur trade in early American history by considering the destruction of animal life and how it pitted Indian tribes against each other as hunting grounds were depleted" (A12). The critics explain that an eighth grader is not going to recognize any positive aspects of the fur trade because of the way the suggestion is worded. The project leaders acknowledge that the tone and slant of some of the suggestions may lead the jury and have agreed to review and possibly revise the standards before printing the 20,000 copies that are slated to be distributed this spring. Charles Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civic Education, said of the project leaders, "They are being very responsive. They acknowledged there were a few problems, and they said they would remedy them. But we shouldn't try to throw out the entire barrel just because there are a few bad apples in it" (A12).
Multiculturalism is neither about affirmative action nor about making Europeans into demons. It is about finding the narratives that have not been written, histories of people and groups that have been distorted or ignored, and repairing American history by bringing them in. Mayberry-Lewis calls the balance between the arguments of the conservatives and liberals "serious multiculturalism." "This corrective is based on a presumption of tolerance and a desire for mutual understanding and mutual accommodation among subcultures," Mayberry-Lewis explains. He knows that critics will call this a "hopelessly utopian vision," but it is no more so, he argues, than the idea of democracy, and Americans feel it is realistic to make democracy work (512). Mayberry-Lewis concludes:
The indigenous challenge to the United States is to make a further leap of the imagination, beyond the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism; to imagine a nation that can tolerate indigenous cultures within its pluralism; to imagine a nation that does not need to extinguish the traditions that nourish it, because it inspires in its citizens a commitment to the transcendent Americanism. If any country in the Americas could achieve this, it would be the best possible tribute to the civilization that was imposed on the hemisphere five hundred years ago, for it would show that Western civilization was not exhausted (as its critics claim) by the waning of European hegemony. It would show instead that Western civilization is capable of renewal, of using its democratic traditions to lead the way into the multiethnic future that awaits us all. (512)
Mayberry-Lewis' vision is indeed idealistic, and it is going to take a serious commitment by the educators, and input from the minority groups that have been neglected, to make it a reality. But America has a history of striving for idealistic goals, and often those goals are eventually realized.
As Mayberry-Lewis implies in his concluding comments, the debate about whether or not to implement multicultural education in the American school system is a mute point. Multicultural education has already permeated the classroom, but to a limited extent, especially in conservative communities. School systems that have implemented multicultural education to a greater extent are the ones that have taken the initiative, and have pursued materials from non-traditional sources, such as multicultural publishers. Many of the traditional textbooks need a lot more work before they can be considered multicultural. America has never been anything but "multi" cultural, even before the Europeans arrived. The indigenous populations of the Americas were extremely diverse, and were only lumped into one group, "Indians," by the Europeans. It is about time that our children's textbooks reflected America's diversity, past and present.