Multicultural Illiteracy

School Administrator, May, 1999 by Sandra Stotsky

Schools' treatment of diversity places students into categories and applies ineffectual learning methods to these stereotypes

The meaning of the word "diversity" has been badly abused in recent decades. American educators have long honored diversity in the only educationally meaningful sense of the word--individual difference.

For generations teachers were trained to look at students as individuals. Each student was supposedly endowed with a different combination of talents, abilities, interests and opinions. There is no question that this way of understanding diversity created strong positive educational outcomes and could continue to do so. Intellectual or social conformity has never been an American trait.

But in an Orwellian transformation of the meaning of the word, diversity has come to mean looking at a student as a representative of a particular demographic category. It now conveys the erroneous notion that, for example, all girls think and learn in one way, all boys in another or that all black students think and learn in one way, all Asians in another, all white students in yet another. To see students as members of a particular racial category or "culture" (to use current educational jargon), rather than as unique individuals, makes all the difference in the world,

Few positive outcomes are possible in an educational system that slots all students into spurious racial categories and then attaches fictitious ways of thinking, learning and knowing to each. The result is not the elimination of stereotypes but the freezing of them.

Classified by Category

We always have had different races and ethnic groups in our schools, although not in the same numbers or kinds in all schools. I grew up in a small Massachusetts town in which the children or grandchildren of early 20th century immigrants were as numerous as the children of those whose families had lived in the town for several hundred years.

As children, we all knew each others' backgrounds. We knew who spoke Italian, Armenian, Greek, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Polish or French Canadian in their home. We knew which families attended the local Catholic church, one of the many Protestant churches in town or the synagogue in a neighboring city. But not one of my teachers, in my presence, ever denigrated our ethnic, linguistic or religious backgrounds. Indeed, what they emphasized was something all our parents wanted them to stress. All of us, we were told repeatedly, were American citizens. And we were individual American citizens, not Lithuanian Americans, Irish Americans and so on, even though our parents may have belonged to the local Lithuanian, Polish or Italian social club or read an Armenian or Polish newspaper. We were not classified into racial or ethnic categories for any purpose.

Yes, there was prejudice in America. Why should this country be different from the others? But we all knew from our families there was even more prejudice elsewhere in the world, especially in those countries from which our families had come. Furthermore, the prejudice here was not just in those families who had been here for generations, it was also in the newcomers.

Every group had its own prejudices toward outsiders, as we all learned through experience, and it didn't bother us much. It was just another one of life's many hurdles to surmount. What was more important was that we all lived under the same set of laws as American citizens. These were ideals, to be sure, not always realities, but they were official ideals with teeth behind them, and we learned that they could be appealed to or drawn on, as women found in the early part of the century in gaining the right to vote, or as court decisions and civil rights legislation showed us in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fortunately for us, our teachers didn't subject us to endless lessons on tolerance and on how to be respectful of each other's "culture." They simply modeled tolerance for us and dealt, briefly, with problematic incidents whenever they arose in school. We were thus able to spend most of our school time on academic matters. Our main responsibility was to go to school every day, to be respectful of our teachers and to do our homework.

It's true we didn't see our home cultures in what we read in school, but we identified with each other as American citizens, something we and our parents were proud to be, despite our country s flaws. We probably would have welcomed attempts at a realistic curriculum that included more information or literature on the many immigrant groups in this country, as well as on the African Americans and Native Americans, but only if it did not end up making it more difficult for us to learn how to read and write English or giving us a warped or dishonest view of our own country and the larger world within which we live.

Negative Connotations

It is highly ironic that multiculturalism has evolved as an educational philosophy from its original and positive meaning of inclusion to mean something very negative, especially for us. This was one of the major findings of my research on the contents of all the grade 4 and grade 6 readers in six leading basal reading series, published between 1993 and 1995, as reported in Losing Our Language.