MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

The United States is one of the world's mod diverse multicultural societies. To appreciate this inheritance and all who contributed to it, our children need a multicultural education. In the past, our schools taught only what was perceived as mainstream and sought to minimize controversies over race, religion and ethnicity by ignoring them. But without knowledge of the many streams that nourish the general society, the "mainstream" cannot be properly studied or understood. This is why our children need a multicultural curriculum, one in which the contributions and roles of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and other minorities are fairly and accurately depicted, and one in which the history of non-western societies is part of the required curriculum.

As a multicultural people, we are also, however, a single nation bonded by a common set of democratic principles, individual rights and moral values. To understand and defend the very principles and institutions that provide our society its common aspirations, and allow us in our multicultural society to live together in relative peace¾as compared to the constant warfare that tears apart so many other non-homogeneous societies¾our children need an education in the humanities that imparts to them the values of tolerance, freedom, equality, pluralism and common human dignity. This also is part of a multicultural education; and while such values and principles can be conveyed using ideas and documents from a range of cultures, such education also requires, unavoidably, a special emphasis on the history and legacies of those societies that have been most important in developing democratic ideals and practices.

In recent years, history and literature textbooks have been revised to be more inclusive of America's minorities and non-western civilizations. However, as documented by Paul Gagnon in the AFT-commissioned Democray's Half-Told Story, these changes are often "squeezed in" as sidebars, peripheral to the main story. This is not good enough. The story of America is a multicultural one from the start. We interacted with and were built and shaped and inspired by people of every immigrant stream, of many races, cultures and religions. Both because we do not want to be a fragmented people and because our children cannot learn from a fragmented curriculum, we do not want a curriculum in which each culture is merely allocated its share of sidebars and fragments. We need a cohesive, inclusive curriculum in which the main story "how we built this nation and its pluralistic institutions" is understood to have been the work of many different people of diverse races, classes, and religions.

Together with this broader view of U.S. history, the richness and diversity of the world's peoples and their histories should also be central to the curricula. It's not enough for high school students to spend just one year on world history, wildly globe-hopping from one continent to the next, without the time to truly comprehend what they're studying. A full two years of world history should be required of students at the post-elementary level.

Similarly, the study of literature should be expanded to include the best that has been thought and experienced and written across all cultures and throughout all of human history; only in this way can it truly be said that the "humanities" are being taught.

Curriculum planners and textbook publishers now have at their disposal a wealth of new scholarship about the culture and history of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and many other ethnic groups at home and across the globe. Some of this new material has made its way into university-level textbooks. It is time that elementary and secondary school texts also reflect the best in contemporary scholarship.

In bringing about these curricular revisions, we should be guided, as in all curriculum development, by the standards of quality and accuracy defined by the relevant disciplines and by the recognition that, given limited curricular time, we want to include that which is most essential and valuable to our children's learning "to all of our children's learning. We are not talking here of creating a segregated curricula" one for minorities that features just minority heroes and another for whites that focuses on just white heroes; our children need the full picture, the whole truth, as best it is understood, so that they can understand the potential for good and for evil in all cultures and in each individual. We are talking about an integrated multicultural curriculum that's worth teaching to everyone "one that has integrity, quality, and rigor" one that offers all of our children what they all need to know: the strengths of diversity, the values that allow diversity to flourish, the history and literature that has shaped our country and our world.

Adopting these as our standards will not stop the arguments. There will always be debate about what's essential and of high quality; and the incomplete evidence of history will always produce historians with varying interpretations. But this lack of total consensus does not free us as educators from striving for these standards.

Making these changes will be difficult. It will require close and lasting collaboration between faculty members in the schools and the universities to review the available scholarship, to determine what belongs in the K-12 curriculum, and to devise ways to convey the materials to diverse audiences. But making these changes will be vital for all our students; not only will it help to give a more accurate picture of America's democratic experience, but it will also give a more dynamic, engaging and accurate account of the story of all human life.