Multicultural Education

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Multicultural Education

[Category]:

Social Issues

[Paper Title]:

Multicultural Education

[Text]:

America has long been called "The Melting Pot" due to the fact that
it is made up of a varied mix of races, cultures,

and ethnicity's. As more and more immigrants come to America searching for a
better life, the population naturally

becomes more diverse. This has, in turn, spun a great debate over
multiculturalism. Some of the issues at stake are: who

is benefiting from education, and how to present material in a way so not to
offend a large number of people.

In the 1930's several educators called for programs of cultural diversity
that encouraged ethnic and minority

students to study their own heritages. This is not a simple feat due to the
fact that there is a lot of diversity within individual

cultures. A look at a 1990 census shows that the American population has
changed noticeably in the last ten years, with

one out of every four Americans identifying themselves as black, Hispanic,
Asian, Pacific Islander, or American Indian

(Gould 198). The number of foreign born residents also reached an all time
high of twenty million, easily passing the 1980

record of fourteen million. Most people, from educators to philosophers,
agree that an important first step in successfully

joining multiple cultures is to develop an understanding of each others
background.

In 1980, Stanford University came up with a program - later known as the
"Stanford-style multicultural curriculum"

which aimed to familiarize students with traditions, philosophy, literature,
and history of the West. The program consisted

of 15 required books by writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Aquinas,
Marx, and Freud. By 1987, a group called the

Rainbow Coalition argued the fact that the books were all written by DWEM's
(Dead White European Males). They felt

that this type of teaching denied students the knowledge of contributions by
people of color, women and other oppressed

groups. In 1987, the faculty voted 39 to 4 to change the curriculum and do
away with the fifteen book requirement and the

term "Western" for the study of at least one non-European culture
and proper attention to be given to the issues of race and

gender (Gould 199). This debate was very important because its publicity
provided the grounds for the argument that

America is a racist society and to study only one culture would not
accurately portray what really makes up this c

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