Multicultural Education in the New Century

School Administrator, May, 1999 by James A. Banks

Research can rebut the distortion of critics who see multicultural education as a divisive force

An important goal of multicultural education is to educate citizens who can participate successfully in the workforce and take action in the civic community to help the nation actualize its democratic ideals. These ideals, such as justice, equality and freedom, are set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Democratic societies, such as the United States, are works in progress that require citizens who are committed to democratic ideals, who are keenly aware of the gap between a nation's ideals and realities and who are able and willing to take thoughtful action that will help make democratic ideals a reality.

Distortion by Critics

Although some critics have misrepresented multicultural education and argued it is divisive and will Balkanize the nation, the aim of multicultural education is to unify our nation and to help put in place its ideal of e pluribus bus unum-- "out of many, one."

The claim by conservative social commentators that multicultural education will divide the nation assumes that it is now united. However, our nation is deeply divided along racial, ethnic and social-class lines. Multicultural education is trying to help unify a deeply divided nation, not to divide one that is united.

Multicultural theorists assume that we cannot unite the nation around its democratic ideals by forcing people from different racial, ethnic and cultural groups to leave their cultures and languages at the schoolhouse door. An important principle of a democratic society is that citizens will voluntarily participate in the commonwealth and that their participation will enrich the nation-state.

When citizens participate in society and bring their cultural strengths to the national civic culture, both they and the nation are enriched. Renato Rosaldo, the Stanford anthropologist, calls this kind of civic participation cultural citizenship.

We can create an inclusive, democratic and civic national community only when we change the center to make it more inclusive and reflective of the diversity that enriches our nation. This will require that we bring people and groups that are now on the margins of society into the center.

Schools should be model communities that mirror the kind of democratic society we envision. In democratic schools the curriculum reflects the cultures of the diverse groups within society, the languages and dialects that students speak are respected and valued, cooperation rather than competition is fostered among students and students from diverse racial, ethnic and social-class groups are given equal status in the school.

Malor Challenges

Several societal trends present challenges for educating effective citizens in the new century. These trends include the growing ethnic, racial, cultural and language diversity in the United States, caused in part by the largest influx of immigrants to the nation since the beginning of the 20th century.

Unlike in the past, most immigrants are coming from nations in Asia and Latin America. Only a small percentage of the immigrants are coming from European nations. U.S. Census projections indicate that people of color will make up 47.5 percent of the nation's population by 2050. Students of color will make up about 48 percent of the nation's school-age youth by 2020. In 1995, they made up 35 percent of the nation's public school students.

The increasing percentage of school-age youth who speak a first language other than English and the widening gap between the rich and poor also present challenges to educating effective citizens in the new century. In 1990, 14 percent of school-age youth spoke a first language other than English. One in every five was living below the official government poverty line.

Addressing Diversity

The challenge to school leaders is to find ways to ensure that the rich contributions that diverse groups can make to our nation and the public schools becomes a reality. The cultural and language groups within our nation have values, perspectives and languages that can help the nation solve some of its intractable problems and humanize the lives of all of its citizens. During World War II the lives of many American soldiers were saved because the Navajo language was used in a secret code that perplexed military leaders in Japan. The code contributed to the victory of the Allies in the South Pacific and also was used in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

In order for multicultural education to be implemented in ways that will help actualize effective citizenship education, improve race relations and increase the academic achievement of students from diverse groups, the field must be viewed broadly and attention must be paid to the research that has accumulated during the last two decades. This research, briefly summarized below, is reviewed extensively in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education.

Too often multicultural education is conceptualized narrowly to mean adding content about diverse groups to the curriculum or expanding the canon taught in schools.