Multcultural Education

11 Pages 2771 Words

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 ethnicities. 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 under fire are who is benefiting from a multicultural education, and how to best present the material in a way so as to offend the least amount of people. There are many variations to these themes as will be discussed later in this paper.
In the 1930s, several educators called for programs of cultural diversity that encouraged ethnic and minority students to study their respective heritages. This is not a simple feat due to the fact that there is much diversity within individual cultures. “A look at the 1990 census shows that the American population has changed more noticeably in the last ten years than in any other time in the twentieth century, with one out of every four Americans identifying themselves as black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander or American Indian,” (Gould, 1995, p.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. However, the similarities stop there.
One problem is in defining the term “multiculturalism”. When it is looked at simply as meaning the existence of a culturally integrated society, many people have no problems. However, when you go beyond that and try to suggest a different way of arriving at that culturally integrated society, everyone seems to have a different opinion on what will work. In 1980, Stanford University came up with a program – later known as the “Stanford-style multicultu...