The regents' round table - plans for more racial sensitivity in New York school curricula

National Review, Dec 8, 1989 by Lawrence Auster

The Regents' Round Table

NEW YORK--The redicalization of American schools proceeds apace. A report recently issued by New York State Commissioner of Education Thomas Sobol, entitled "A Curriculum of Inclusion," opens with the declaration that "African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans/Latinos, and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries." No, this oppression does not consist in giving an inferior education to minorities, but in giving them the same education as whites. A "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives" has "a terribly damaging effect on the psyche of young people of African, Asian, Latino, and Native American descent." The report calls for a totally restructured curriculum for the state's public schools, in which "the history, achievements, aspirations, and concerns of people of all cultures [shall be] made an integral part of all curricula." This even includes science and math, since "by ostensibly omitting cultural references from science and mathematics materials, a subtle message is given to all children that all science and mathematics originated within the European culture."

The proposal was released at the July meeting of the New York Board of Regents, the body that determines state education policy. Professor Harry Hamilton, a member of the Commissioner's Task Force on Minorities, which prepared the report, told the Regents: "We're on the brink of something very important for New York and the nation. We have to change the entire framework in the way we look at ourselves as a nation." Hamilton invoked mythic imagery: "Instead of one group, European Americans, at the head of a long table, with other cultures present only as invited guests, we will have a Round Table with all cultures equal." Sitting at their own long table, the Regents received the report with enthusiasm. Even conservatives liked it; former Chancellor Willard Genrich, one of a tiny minority on the Board that had just tried to block a major expansion of bilingual education, declared: "This is an excellent document and we should proceed with it."

Unfortunately, if their recent handling of bilingual education is any guide, the Regents seem likely to decide on the curriculum plan on the basis of uplifting slogans about a new America rather than critical thought about the plan's contents. The report does contain some good ideas about widening the curriculum to reflect minority experiences; but on the whole it is a poorly thought-out document, steeped in racial victimology and hostility to the West. The idea that Western-oriented education robs minority youth of self-esteem, "'turns off' the child who is not European American," is not backed up by any evidence at all. When we recall such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, as well as a host of other American blacks who were shining products of "Eurocentered" education, it is hard to take that idea seriously. And why, if a group's curricular "invisibility" harms its self-esteem, have Japanese Americans done so well? Asians have obviously been added to the litany of aggrieved and ego-damaged groups to make plausible the notion of a blanket educational oppression of all non-whites and the resulting need for a radical overhaul.

Surprisingly, the report concedes the presence of substantial "multicultural" content (as well as the absence of negative stereotypes) in the present curriculum. A series of textbook reviews written from each minority viewpoint shows that "there has been a serious attempt to broaden the content to reflect the pluralism of American society." But such inclusion, says the report, does not solve the problem, because it is only "additive and not at the center of the endeavors." This is what the Task Force calls "Eurocentered multiculturalism." The mere inclusion of material on minority experience, no matter how extensive, "cannot counteract deeply rooted racist traditions in American culture. Merely adding marginal examples of 'other' cultures to an assumed dominant culture cannot reverse long established and entrenched policies and practices of that dominant culture.... The European American monocultural perspective prevails. Its value system and norms dominate."

Hence the report's inoffensive-sounding title, "A Curriculum of Inclusion," conceals a radical intent; it is not just greater inclusion of minority cultures the Task Force seeks, but the dismantling of the dominant culture. By the Orwellian magic of a name--"European American"--the national culture is transformed into an ethnic culture on the same level as all of America's minority cultures. Children will be taught that all cultures are to be "equally valued"; that the contributions of Puerto Ricans and Chinese and Iroquois are as important in the development of our society as America's historical mainstream culture. The truth or falseness of this idea is beside the point; we are dealing here with pure ideology--a call for permanent cultural revolution. "How can one value other cultures," asks one of the report's contributors, "if it is implicit that Anglo-conformity is what is valued and other cultures are tolerated and celebrated only when they do not interfere with the social order?"