Multiculturalism in the Public Schools

...By reducing cultural difference to easily taught categories, multiculturalists can persuade themselves of their own objectivity and tolerance...

...Afrocentrists sometimes suggest, based on the flimsiest of evidence, that Africans arrived in America centuries before Columbus and that a black man was instrumental in the invention of the telephone...

...And the road that needs to be traveled by an uneducated black would seem to be no less far...

...People cannot act or interact at all in any meaningful way," writes Hall, "except through the medium of culture," and people in the multicultural classroom appear to be no exception...

...Arabs tend to stand very close to other people...

...Some educators are suggesting changes in the content of math and science...

...Shakespeare's plays are assigned not for the beauty of their language, or for study of the nature of love or evil, but as cadavers to be dissected for lesions of sexism...

...Yet the 90 percent nonwhite Oakland school district has rejected the new textbooks for this curriculum for not going far enough...

...Fueling acceptance of these premises are two dilemmas of particular concern to educators in the public schools: first, the extraordinary demographic changes that by the year 2000 will increase minorities to 30 percent of the public school population and that teachers all over the country are already witnessing and, second, the continued disappointing academic performance of disadvantaged minority children...

...This collective identity, while of deep significance to many Americans, still offers a child no sense of future direction and, given its sentimental packaging, little realistic promise of community...

...Small Victories, Samuel Freedman's account of a year in the life of an English teacher and her students in a decayed New York City high school, recounts the stories of a number of immigrant students who sought this normalcy in their lives...

...Effective schooling accelerates this...

...It's not surprising that multiculturalists are forced to deny this kind of hard-won pride felt by the successful—wholly or partly—assimilated man or woman...

...Multiculturalists seem also to envision the schools not as a bridge to a common society in which for better or worse children will eventually have to work and live but as a place where a fairer and more diverse order will be magically constructed...

...How much of this can we expect a child to understand...

...In fact, their program is suffused 26 • DISSENT Multiculturalism in Public Schools with cultural bias and unwittingly demands its own sort of assimilation...

...One of the central assumptions of the multiculturaliststhat bias can be found in the information which is omitted as well as that which is openly voiced—appears to have come back to haunt them...

...In the Brooklyn, New York, school attended by my own children, a fifth grade teacher was asked by a parent why her child was not being assigned more homework...

...But where in a Western economy will someone with a tendency to the approximate find a job...

...Eva Hoffman, in Lost in Translation, the story of her girlhood emigration from Poland and acculturation in America, titles the first section of her story "Paradise...

...In the humanities, this would have obvious results: students listen to music, read books, and use artistic methods from Africa, in the case of the Afrocentrists, or from a variety of cultures...

...George Carruthers, a black scientist...

...Instead of offering disadvantaged children an education that would promote social mobility within American society, they would indoctrinate—it's difficult to avoid this word—them with feelings of self-worth and a belief in pluralism in preparation for an imagined new world...

...Instead, by trivializing the power of culture to determine the shape of experience, the pedagogy of self-esteem sentimentalizes the lives of children growing up outside the American mainstream...

...Hall notes one example of cultural difference that he himself, an experienced anthropologist, took some time to uncover...

...We can hear an echo of Rousseau and possibly Dewey here...

...Immigrant stories usually reveal that it is not self-hatred that leads the child to embrace American culture but rather the longing for a state of "ordinary reality," as Hoffman calls it, and a relief from bivalence, as well as the inevitable youthful desire for conformity...

...In one preschool outside Cleveland, for instance, black children are placed in groups named for various African tribes and, because of the tradition of the extended family in Africa, are taught by a group of four teachers...

...Leaving aside the question of whether such information is really a precondition for self-confidence, it seems likely that children filled with "facts" that find little assent or awareness in the wider society may well find themselves unemployable—and resentful...

...In other words, the schools must not merely respect but programatically encourage ethnic identity...

...By seeing the effects of education as a kind of "colonialism" forced on the vanquished by the victors and insisting that children do not need to change as a result of schooling, multiculturalists, like many Americans, deny the transforming power of intellectual growth...

...Hannah Arendt observed more than thirty years ago the tendency of American schools to erect a "miniature model" of a new world that is then expected "to go on developing naturally and automatically like the children themselves...

...The second section, her initial resettlement in Vancouver, which her description renders identical to a typical American suburb, is called "Exile...

...Many educators feel that a more subtle bias continues to be manifested in, for instance, the disproportionate number of black and Hispanic children in "special education" classes...

...In other words, cultural self-esteem promotes both an inadequate individuality and an inadequate collectivity...

...In their acceptance of the American premise that education is the path toward social equality, multiculturalists also promote a unicultural idea related to American individualism...

...Could thirty strange-looking youngsters speaking in a strange language about the virtues of ethnic pluralism or even Polish customs and traditions really have allowed her to feel less fragmented...

...In most instances, they categorize these perspectives—given some flexibility—as Native American, Asian, African, Hispanic, and European...

...For one thing, teaching all students to appreciate their ancestry is a tall order in almost any state...

...The premises behind public school reform don't differ all that much from those in the university debate: that knowledge cannot be separated from power or, more specifically, that the information traditionally offered students reflects the domination of white AngloEuropean males...

...Yet any decent American teacher must believe in the democratic goals of education and has every right to insist on her students' assimilation in this regard...

...Given the long history that places public education at the center of the American vision of genuine equality, the need for multicultural reform in the primary and secondary schools would seem to be pressing...

...Likewise, in Sacramento, young black males have been taught through the "African Mind Model Technique...

...At a school in Sacramento, Hispanic students have been taught Mayan mathematics...

...A Japanese family, more familiar with a mode of feeling characterized by the saying "The nail which is sticking up must be hammered down" is likely to find self-esteem an utterly alien idea...

...The "Anglo-European perspective" of traditional academic material is modified or, in some cases, completely scrapped...

...If I rehearse here the changes in my private life after my Americanization, it is finally to emphasize the gain," writes Rodriguez...

...Yet this pride and the sense of worthwhile change might provide helpful reassurance to children who may intuit, unlike their teachers, the danger of their separateness...

...At conferences on multicultural reform, Hispanic and Asian speakers frequently describe their own sense of loss and estrangement in American schools...

...Perhaps...

...One group of multiculturalists, the Afrocentrists, has developed a curriculum centered on an African-American point of view...

...Many immigrant children were renamed by teachers too lazy and insensitive to learn how to pronounce given names, but many immigrant children chose to rename themselves, hoping to refashion themselves into a new identity consistent with a new reality...

...There are things a sensitive teacher can do to lessen the distance between himself or herself as an inevitable representative of mainstream culture and a child at odds with that culture, as Freedman's Small Victories and Tracy Kidder's moving Among Schoolchildren demonstrate...

...Still, these objections are more practical than programmatic since they fail to address the 24 • DISSENT Multiculturalism In Public Schools underlying sense of injustice that has led to the pedagogy of cultural self-esteem...

...More important, they are not idiosyncratic tics, detachable from the feelings they signal...

...Halloween has been replaced by Africa Day, Thanksgiving becomes Family Day, and so forth...

...The administrators and teachers of Oakland have won for their students the only sort of Pyrrhic victory possible when the battle for educational reform is cast in terms of self-esteem...

...The future of a disadvantaged child nurtured on multiculturalism and self-esteem is a hazy one...

...Stories like these loom large in the historical consciousness of reformers...

...One could argue, of course, that children do not need to absorb the hidden and involuntary assumptions of a culture in order to learn some degree of tolerance or self-esteem...

...He maintains his connection to his culture and family during his metamorphosis from a working-class Mexican child into a middleclass American, but the nature of the connection is utterly changed: My need to think so much and so abstractly about my parents and our relationship was in itself an indication of my long education...

...Some of the current reforms in California, where students are now required to study three years of world history and three years of American history, with greater attention paid to minority experience, look promising...

...In other courses, the infusion would be just as deep...

...Knowing the values, beliefs, history, and contributions of other cultures is supposed to lead to increased tolerance...

...Not surprisingly, children of southern Italian ancestry have not fared as well in American schools as Jewish or Chinese children...

...Even though self-esteem appears in part designed to foster a wider sense of possibility — "You can be what you wanna be," promise the heroic stories of minority men and women—the quintessential question of the individualistic American childhood— "What do you want to be when you grow up...

...The minority girl who grows up in a home where women are groomed to marry young and nurture children and where men are expected to enjoy the freedom of the public world will hardly find cultural affirmation in a classroom that calls these things into question...

...Similarly, self-esteem, the foundation of the entire theory, is a version of American therapeutic "expressive individualism," described in Habits of the Heart (by Robert Bellah et al...

...The reason that minority children have not fared so well in the past, it is argued, is that the schools, like society as a whole, have been dominated by an Anglo-European cultural perspective...

...WINTER • 1992 • 29...

...He dramatizes his cultural identity in virtually everything he does: how often he smiles at a student, whether he bends down when speaking to a child, the amount of freedom children have in their assignments, to speak out in class, or even to choose their own color crayon...

...Children are taught the destructive history of racial and ethnic prejudice...

...Of course, the American public schools have long been a breeding ground for antiintellectualism of this sort, as Richard Hofstadter has shown...

...and that the study of previously scorned or oppressed cultures will provide alternative and, by implication, corrective modes of thinking...

...Thus, they tend to simplify the power of cultural identity: teach the children their own culture and they do not have to lose it...

...Despite the strong feelings that it had given me a crucial part of myself, it told me virtually nothing about who I was as an individual or how I might live in the world as myself...

...Likewise, the multicultural student is encouraged to feel unique but to locate his uniqueness in his ethnic identity, that is to say, a collective identity...

...Furthermore, it is questionable how much schools can do to assuage the sense of loss and estrangement that is an inevitable part of immigration...

...teach them other cultures and they will respect them...

...Education must cultivate the child's natural self—read authentic ethnic identity—not constrain him or her in an artificial mold—read Anglo-European identity...

...My father and mother did not pass their time thinking about the cultural meanings of their experience...

...The federal government has also lent its support to organizations that help develop multicultural curricula...

...The school provides a miniature model of a world that doesn't exist...

...Every book is examined through the lens of a few contemporary adult concerns...

...Although it is unlikely that immigrant parents sought to have their native culture humiliated and shamed out of their children, they were undoubtedly seeking a foothold on the economic ladder and a bridge into a society that they found alien, as much for its diversity as for its Anglo-European ways...

...Instead of allowing books to enlarge children's mental categories, multiculturalism insists on confining potentially flexible minds in a straitjacket of socially useful terminology...

...that the mind is inescapably restrained by cultural forces...

...Nor can such approaches inculcate the analytic skills desperately needed by this generation of students: the vocabulary and categories of analysis—bias, stereotype, oppression—are too narrow for that...

...In a Queens, New York district with a large population of Koreans, parents were angered by a social studies unit on Asia that they felt paid inordinate attention to Japan...

...that is, she can assimilate...

...Another group, more in line with the precise meaning of the word "multiculturalism," offers academic material from multiple perspectives...

...Hence, the destructive power of stereotyping is one of the central lessons of the multicultural classroom...

...There are obvious practical problems when a child's cultural self-esteem is a precondition for learning...

...When multiculturalists group some minorities as Asian, for example, they open up a Pandora's box of Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Thais, Indians, Filipinos, Laotians, and so forth...

...many Oakland students are studying history this year without textbooks...

...A major goal of multicultural education is to improve academic achievement," writes James Banks, a statement endorsed by virtually all reformers...

...Yet these categories, as Hall's example should make clear, do little to help a child empathize with the lived experience of a culturally alien "other...

...As he confronts his students, a teacher is invisibly tied in a net of cultural assumptions about the purpose of education, the proper relationship between teacher and student, the nature of childhood, the interiority of the individual...

...The celebratory "addons" of a decade ago such as Black History Month or Puerto Rican Day or even courses devoted to single-group studies are now WINTER • 1992 • 23 Multiculturalism In Public Schools scorned as a mere "tourist curriculum," to quote The Anti-Bias Curriculum, a publication of the National Association for the Education of Young Children...

...For many educators, the "gorgeous mosaic" of cultural diversity provides not just the decorative detail but the entire substructure of multicultural education...

...rhythms of speech...

...Once mental health becomes a central concern, a teacher can neglect a child's intellectual growth for the most virtuous of reasons— because she cares...

...The self that was, writes Hoffman, becomes "lost in translation...

...They describe teachers in ghetto schools who despised their young charges enough to call them black "animals" and who inspired so much defeatism as to ruin lives...

...at one school children are taught to read graphs by comparing unemployment rates of black and white teenagers...

...The great wave of Eastern and Southern European migration at the turn of the century and into the 1930s, for instance, yields plenty of stories of cruelty toward the bewildered greenhorn children who arrived at school doors: teachers who yelled "You dirty little Russian Jew!," who casually changed the names of children that they found too tiresome to pronounce, who insulted children for their eating habits, for not carrying handkerchiefs, for smelling bad...

...And yet positively: . . . if, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact...

...The list of urban school districts with programs in place or in the planning stage might surprise even its supporters, who once thought of themselves as beleaguered contenders: New York, Washington, Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Rochester, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Camden, Newark, Portland...

...Rather, they are all part of the shared, subliminal perception of the universe which we call culture...

...Yet in worrying over whether Martina is a stereotype, as some multiculturalists do, they reveal more about our own culture's expectations for women than they do about an alien culture's traditions...

...For the multiculturalists, self-esteem is a kind of counterstatement to racism and forced assimilation into a dominant culture...

...the way we stand, sit, or make eye contact—all of our tiny, unconscious, communicative signs—are culturally distinctive...

...The values of the school, so vacantly neutral in past decades, become clearly grounded in tolerance and mutual respect...

...It is the history of this injustice within American public schools that shapes some of the emotional background of multiculturalism...

...in California, where the Board of Education services eighty-two different ethnic groups, or New York, where the number exceeds one hundred, such an approach to education tends to produce a Babel of bureaucratic directives...

...But this also raises a clear and practical question: can multiculturalism, as now conceived, successfully educate children, especially those most in need of the egalitarian promise of our public schools...

...She cannot keep her cultural integrity and readily adopt the idea of equality between the sexes...

...The very children who are in most need of inspiration—those for whom books are foreign— can only respond to such a bureaucratic and lifeless view of books with indifference...

...It also dramatizes the exile's confusion and paralysis as she is bombarded with what seem like chaotic fragments of strange information...

...There are other reasons to believe that cultural self-esteem may undermine rather than promote effective intellectual achievement...

...It's a charming and evidently beloved story in Puerto Rico, but by contemporary American standards, the gender roles are stereotyped—and stereotypes are of deep concern to multiculturalists...

...But one has the feeling in reading their books, listening to their speeches, and sitting in their classrooms, that they are really seeking to short-circuit the democratic ideal of education...

...The schools were the only public agencies available to them...

...If only it were that simple...

...As a child learns to use her mind in new ways, she will find herself unalterably changed and inevitably estranged from her own foreign-born family...

...Frances Fitzgerald, in America Revised, describes a puritanical and fundamentalist strain in much progressive educational reform...

...The therapeutic attitude rests on the idea that "the individual must find and assert his or her true self" aside from "constraints of social roles...

...The teacher replied: "Long after the children have forgotten the major exports of Chile or the location of Honduras, they will remember how respectfully I treated them...

...For southern Italian peasants, Nathan Glazer says in Beyond the Melting Pot, "one improved one's circumstances by hard work, perhaps by a lucky strike, but not by spending time in a school, taught by women, who didn't even beat the children...

...In addition to promoting skills of limited usefulness, self-esteem, predicated as it is on a search for cultural pride, tends to serve up a simmering stew of half-truths...

...It was I who described their daily lives with airy ideas...

...In New York State, for instance, students are taught the major influences on the United States Constitution: the European Enlightenment and the Iroquois political system...

...Equally important to the emotional background of multiculturalism are the accounts of racism, both blatant and neglectful, of the sort given in the late sixties by Jonathan Kozol in Death at an Early Age and Herbert Kohl in Thirty-Six Children...

...Martina, the heroine of the story, is a lovely cockroach who finds a lucky coin and wishes for a new dress and face powder...

...Packaging groups of people under labels that often feel arbitrary to the individuals involved only exacerbates this kind of tribalism...

...She is courted by a handsome frog and a duck and is finally landed by Perez, a gallant mouse...

...Some of the practices of multiculturalists at first appear sensible and forward-looking, given the problems of an increasingly diverse society...

...But while few would deny the destruction wrought on the psyches of children by racist educators, the role of the school in promoting assimilation, whether it be from a foreign culture or from an entrenched subculture, is a far more complicated matter than most multiculturalists have made it...

...Culture penetrates to the roots of [the] nervous system," writes Edward T. Hall in The Hidden Dimension...

...In doing so, she lifts the veil on myriad other cultural assumptions that touch on it: the value of work in shaping identity, the relative independence of the American child, the possibility of social mobility and a fuller individuality...

...Ironically, they were objecting to material that was already reformed in 1987 in order to provide a more global perspective...

...Indeed, how does a teacher grade a child's autobiography, a perennial assignment in multicultural classrooms, when it tells a story of racial pain or immigrant loss...

...And with such stories fresh in his or her mind, how does the teacher apply tough standards in grading subsequent assignments...

...Rather than acknowledging the compromises and hard work that are the cost of a satisfying place in the world, schemes like this imply that the world will easily conform to the child and his or her own cultural assertions...

...Ideally, both multicultural factions want to reach children of all ages, from preschool until graduation, and to "infuse" all aspects of the curriculum—art, history, music, reading, writing, math, science, and indeed the total environment of the school—with the values of multiculturalism...

...In science, for instance, the "Portland Baseline Essays" series coordinated by Asa A. Hilliard, Jr., one of the primary spokesmen for Afrocentrism, suggests that in introducing the solar system to first graders one objective should be to describe the camera/ spectrograph of Dr...

...Perez y Martina," a folktale commonly taught as an example of Puerto Rican culture, poses exactly this sort of dilemma...

...True, in the early twentieth century the schools, particularly urban schools, were understood to be in part factories for turning "foreigners" into "Americans...

...The Iowa Board of Education suggests, for example, that students be assigned a book to review for gender bias...

...but these hidden, involuntary assumptions remind us to question the cultural innocence of the multicultural enterprise itself...

...It is assumed that if minority children are taught about their own culture the children will then feel a sense of pride—or self-esteem—that will in turn lead to greater academic success as well as greater personal authenticity...

...In New York, where the State Board of Regents has published a pamphlet saying that black children have a "tendency to approximate space, number and time, instead of aiming for complete accuracy," educators are looking for relevant approaches...

...By contrast, Richard Rodriguez attests to this power throughout his elegiac Hunger of Memory...

...Furthermore, the mind-numbing series of pamphlets, worksheets, self-evaluation forms, mandates, book lists, goal descriptions, and evaluations of administrators, teachers, and other staff—I received a threeinchthick packet of these from Iowa when I requested information on their multicultural program—does little to inspire creative teaching and much to empower stultifying educational bureaucracies...

...One account of Polish immigrants is entitled "My Children Did Not Know Me...

...but in the end, if education is to lead a child successfully into the world, the teacher must first draw children inside this cultural net...

...Central to the argument for courses of this sort is the idea of cultural self-esteem...

...Nowhere in the substantial literature of multiculturalism are there recommendations for serious courses in geography, foreign languages, anthropology, or comparative religion— subjects that might encourage both genuine intellectual achievement and thinking about cultural difference...

...Her story reminds us of the exile's longing for the recollected smells, sights, language, and people—for home in the primal sense, the place of Wordsworthian memory...

...In more tightly status-bound societies, education hardly holds the promise of a better life...

...The gradual assimilation of a new "American" identity does indeed require change and loss...

...And despite the sophistication implied by its name, multiculturalism also displays a familiar American provincialism...

...This is not merely a different "custom," he points out, but rather an expression of a notion of individuality, of privacy, of the location of the ego that is quite at odds with the experience of most Americans...

...This is the very battle waged by educators in inner-city schools where some black students see hardworking, aspiring peers as "acting white...

...Even very young children must sublimate fantasy and imagination to the stern, higher task: learning about unfamiliar "life-styles...

...Shelby Steele, who in The Content of Our Character writes gratefully of the black power movement for helping him to face racism squarely, found that in the end it "did not offer much of a blueprint on how to move my life forward...

...One wonders how much this could have been diminished by a multicultural classroom...

...And naturally, if a fundamental purpose of schooling is to affirm ethnic identity and to "empower" each child according to her or his ancestry, parents are going to make sure that the schools are taking care of their own, thereby leading to a balkanization already decried by a number of critics...

...The dilemmas of the poor and the foreign are wrapped in a colorful WINTER • 1992 • 27 Multicultundism In Public Schools package of cultural pride, thereby reinforcing their separateness, which education, the path into mainstream society, should help to diminish...

...Difficult truths like these do not come easily to educators who need to rely on quick-fix gimmicks to win grants and capture the attention of bureaucratic superiors...

...In a similar sort of dispute, a number of Italian groups have protested the unperson status of Christopher Columbus in the current reforms...

...The loss implies the gain...

...Should teachers choose to teach Huckleberry Finn, they must dwell on its racism...

...is not likely to find satisfying answers in these classrooms...

...Facial expressions like smiling, frowning, and winking...

...Florida, Texas, and states not especially well known for ethnic diversity, such as Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, and Maine, have joined ranks...

...One positive development has come out of the debate over multiculturalism: the recognition that American children need a more sophisticated and richer introduction to history...

...Teachers need to develop a classroom library that provides a balanced representation of diverse physical 28 • DISSENT Multiculturalism in Public Schools characteristics and lifestyles, levels of affluence and social values," writes Patricia Ramsey, professor of child psychology at Mount Holyoke College, in her book Teaching and Learning in a Diverse World...

...Indeed, she will be faced with the enduring dilemma of the immigrant: she can remain true to her culture or she can adopt the values of the school and the larger society...

...One of them, See Wal, the child of impoverished Chinese peasants so poor as to be unable to send their child to a free school in China WINTER • 1992 • 25 Multiculturalism In Public Schools because they could not afford the required books, responds intuitively to The Great Gatsby because he sees a soul mate in the self-invented Jay Gatsby, despite his wealth and upper crust manners...

...When Iowa, surprisingly enough, became the first state in 1975 to mandate a "Multicultural, Nonsexist" education, it set the stage for what has now become educational dogma: "All students must be offered the opportunity to know their cultural heritage and appreciate its uniqueness...

...Some multiculturalists have proposed that word problems in math might not only be rewritten to include non-Anglo names but multicultural and socially relevant information...

...Americans whose ancestry is not European are ignored and denigrated by the dominant culture and as a result suffer from a poor self-image that impedes their motivation...

...According to Jessica Seigel, the boy's teacher and the heroic subject of Freedman's book, many other immigrant children have done the same...