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Michael Kadish
10/7/99
I think it goes without saying in the 1990s that we for the most part want to be more accepting of others, and understand, that as educators, racism should be avoided in schools, and instead be open to other cultures, and help develop the so sought after universal understanding. At the same time, I feel that the multicultural classes, that are mandatory for the teachers, are not helping the problem. In fact I believe quite strongly that they are detrimental to the situation.
The curriculum for the classes is such that we learn to deal with most every ethnic group, by the studies that we have been given. If we have not studied that particular culture, we are taught what to look for, and then how to insert that into the lesson plans. In classes, we are taught to understand, and this is out of the text, that if a black child calls out in class, the teacher should understand that it is the child's upbringing, that African-Americans lives in households where they must speak out to be heard. We are not taught in class that the African American student would probably prefer fried chicken and watermelon to most other foods. The latter is certainly considered racist. However, the former is too.
By teaching the educators to work in such a way that we ("We," as I am an education major) take into account the child's race into account when dealing with their everyday behavior, we are being taught to be racist. A study is, after all, is created to find out a tendency; that tendency is a stereotype. We are taught to consider the children in terms of their racial stereotypes.
If we are taught to take customs into consideration, that is understandable. We should know that a religious Arab girl may not feel right to eat in front of men, because that is what their official religious customs dictate. To say, however, that inherently Latinos will perform in such a way, and you should take that into account, it is to my eyes, the same as a policeman seeing a black man and therefore assuming that he is in therefore a criminal.
What is worse, I think, are the "inconspicuous ways" in which we are to integrate multiculturalism into the classroom. The first step, we are taught, is to teach\utilize the groups' historical leaders and\or their holidays. That does sound important to do, however, I see this as being exceedingly dangerous. If we extol the late of Martin Luther King Jr. as the symbol of the African American movement for Civil Rights, then the entire Civil Rights movement, and potentially, every black individual, loses respect in the students' eyes when they later learn of King's womanizing and/or alleged Communist leanings. Deifying an individual, when any leader is in fact human can easily lead to, after fault is found with the individual, an inductive casting aside of the group's legitimacy.
However, creating figureheads of all groups is what has to be done, if a teacher expects to teach about all of the cultures that are present in the classroom. Naturally, not all of the cultures of the world can be taught, it would need to be limited to the cultures that produced the students in the class, in an attempt to bridge them. Even if just a handful can be taught, there still is a very limited time available. Each group must be reduced to bullet points.
That is asking for trouble. It is cliched, but a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. By knowing that Arabs are limited to four wives, but Muhammad had nine, it seems that I have just invalidated the religion. By knowing only a few facts, any group is potentially a farcical group that the children can laugh at.
The danger in teaching the histories, and then seeing the children have reasons to fight in class, I feel is slight. If there is a Greek student and a Turkish student, or a Jewish student and an Arabic student, a good teacher combined with politically relaxed parents could easily quell the issue. It is a bigger problem when the teacher, in an attempt to be multicultural, as we are taught to do, teaches the history of the ethnic group in a way that bothers the student. For instance, if the child is Iranian and the teacher tries to explain the culture without first determining if the student's family was for the Shah or the Ayatollah, and then teaches in a way which advocates the other side, there are problems that heretofore could have been avoided. The result is that the student now views the teacher as either uninformed or an enemy. This is only in an easy, bipolar situation. I know for a fact, that nearly every Jewish leader, past and present, has an entire spectrum that he\she is viewed upon, and if the teacher gets it wrong, again, they are showed to be ignorant, or hostility has been created.
Speaking of Judaism, Chanukah shows us another huge problem with multiculturalism. It is considered important to mention the holidays of the peoples, to be multicultural, and to teach about those holidays. It is considered very multicultural to have a Christmas\Kwanza\Chanukah celebration. When the students learn later that Chanukah is one of the very minor Jewish holidays, they then feel that they know nothing about the religion, feel they have been mislead, or minimize in the religion in their minds all together.
The flaming example of multiculturalism leading to the problems it is trying to avoid is the "multicultural\multiethnic fair" that leads to segregation. When one of these fairs are organized you literally divide the people up by their specific group, and then the various ethnic groups work together, which is, quite simply, pure segregation. Some organizers try to avoid this by dividing the students randomly, and then each of these groups represents the ethnic group, which then leads to all of the problems mentioned above, this time, more focused, and now, student against student. If they interpret the history from the other perspective, there is fighting. (And do not think for a second that you can teach the history without bias.) By limiting it to bullets, they also belittle the entire group. It would take a miraculous situation for a multicultural/ethnic fair to come out without offending, damaging the students' mentalities.
I'm not against cultural understanding. I am a liberal, and I feel that tolerance is essential to educators, if not everybody else. However, I have seen the way that they that they focus on multiculturalism, and I feel that it is nothing more than spending fortunes to flame racial tension.