Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education 217Taken together, these three books touch upon virtually all of thecontinuingly important aspects of the multiculturalism debate. As I havealready implied, it is clear that the varied aspects of this issue assumeimportance because, ultimately, they all have to do with clamors for equal‘voice’, they all deal with the politics, the sociology and the linguistics ofidentity. And it is notable that (even in Schlesinger’s monograph), concernis expressed in compromise, in mediation, in the ‘middle ground’. Theauthors suggest that this territory has been quite inadequately mapped and, more than a decade on, this remains the case.Multiculturalism in CanadaAny introductory discussion of multiculturalism would be incompletewithout some consideration of the Canadian case for several reasons.First, Canada is unique among new-world ‘receiving’ societies in that ithas had, from the beginning, two powerful cultural and linguisticmainstreams (if the noun can reasonably be pluralized). While Australia,the United States, Brazil and Argentina all have one clearly definedethnolinguistic fons et origo, Canada is marked by a French-Englishduality. I am prescinding from some important matters, of course: thetwo components of Canada’s ethnolinguistic duality are by and largegeographically distinct; all features are in dynamic flux consider therapid and continuing rise of the Hispanic component in the UnitedStates; and my reference to dominant mainstreams does not apply topre-European America. Second, Canada had the first official multiculturalismpolicy. The government position here formed the basis fornational responses elsewhere, notably in Australia and Britain but notin the United States, where there is no official federal multiculturalpolicy. Many accommodations have been made in recent years, however,to the growing Hispanic presence; many services, both official andprivate, are available in Spanish. As well, a federally supported bilingualeducation program was instituted in 1968, and many have interpretedthis (incorrectly, in my view) as a de facto endorsement of multiculturalismand multilingualism; see the more focused discussion inthe next two chapters. Third, the Canadian multicultural policy has hadto coexist from its beginning (in 1971) with another social-engineeringinitiative: official bilingualism.Burnet was an early and incisive commentator on the Canadianmulticulturalism policy, seeing it:as encouraging those members of ethnic groups who want to do so tomaintain a proud sense of the contribution of their groups to