Celebrate Diversity! How do we do that?

Education, particularly public education, is such an exhausting undertaking that often we find educators distracting themselves from substantial problems, such as low grades, student absence, funding programs, maintaining buildings, or replacing classroom equipment, by an obsessive focus on vaguely formulated questions:

Should schools celebrate diversity? (Never mind what this question boils down to in practical terms: we need entertainment.)

Should schools prepare children for the mainstream? (Again, don't bother us with critical analyses - we need simplicity.)

Formulated as a controversy, the question makes the distraction from bottom-line hard issues even more “recreational”: should the schools celebrate diversity or prepare students for the mainstream? Instead of evaluating costs and benefits, assessing risks and dealing with a reality of shades of gray in which today's allies may be tomorrow's adversaries, we want black-and-white - or at least starkly multicolored - choices.

To examine this issue further, see Celebrating Diversity vs. Preparing for the Mainstream: a Pseudo-Controversy?


Cordially
EGR

Multicultural Education: enlightenment or degradation?

I say tomato (to-may-to) and you say tomato (to-mah-to) -- George and Ira Gershwin (1937) Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

Would you eat horse steak or dog? How about jellyfish? Would you let your kids swim naked at the beach? Would you let your teenager and his or her friend of the opposite sex sleep over? Would you want people to move into your neighborhood who worshipped a goddess of death or practiced animal sacrifice as part of a religious ceremony? What about eating peyote as a religious practice?

These are all practices tolerated, encouraged even, by literate people of highly developed cultures from around the world. You personally might be willing to tolerate them. But would your neighbors?

It’s easy to go on enthusiastically about multiculturalism as they do in public schools and elsewhere as if it were a case of just trying a taste of a new kind of food like kielbasa, or pepperoni, or knishes or jambalaya or anything else not too different from “the norm.” But deviant stuff? Not likely!

But how different is deviant? How very deviant is deviant? When should “deviance” be discouraged? Schools tend to stifle deviance a lot sooner than many a household. Where can you talk loudly and whenever you please, where can you go around in your bathing suit, and when can you slap your little brother for misbehaving? In lots of homes, in many, if not most, public places, but, not in a public school.

What kind of reception would some of the “out of the ordinary” behavior described above likely receive if it were suggested as part of your child’s multicultural education? Would it be welcomed and practiced? Or merely discussed as an example? Or disregarded. Or even condemned as disgusting, immoral or UnAmerican?


For a chart and examples and to examine these issues further, see Evaluating Cultural Practices for Inclusion in the Public School Multicultural Curriculum


Cordially
--- EGR

Cultural or Ethnic Difference: which is more easily tolerated?

It is difficult to spell out what cultural difference is, yet cultural difference is not the same as ethnic difference. African-Americans, for example, are not culturally homogeneous; yet in some politically important respects they are different from both Anglo Whites and African-Hispanics.

But upper middle class English-speakers have much more in common as a class than a difference in ethnicity, Black, White, WASP, Polish, Irish, etc. might suggest. Ethnicity is a socially acceptable form of cultural difference because it involves little if any real cultural difference.

Ethnic leaders are leaders precisely because they have been assimilated enough to want to trade off cultural difference for a piece of the social pie. To the extent that other members of their groups are willing to make similar compromises and get involved politically, to that extent will their group achieve ethnic status.

The alternative is to risk being treated as deviant beyond the range of acceptable variation and, like the Amish, or any number of small religious sects, invite the importunities of the State.


To examine these issues further, see Edward G. Rozycki, " Pluralism and Rationality: the Limits of Tolerance. Why public schools fail.

Cordially,

-- EGR