Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education 221Schools acting in relative isolation from other social currents andemphases upon multicultural awareness and its ramifications are,unfortunately, often seen as matters that can be neatly assigned toclassrooms have very limited potency. The realization of this isimportant for all those who wish schools to act as agents of change;thus, calls for schools to ‘empower’ minority students may be wellmeaning,but they are usually naïve. Through example and practice,schools can legitimize cultural varieties and markers (including language),but educational legitimation is not empowerment. It may lead toit, or contribute to it, but (again) not when schools are asked to shoulderthe load almost unassisted.The vagueness of Connors’s remarks reflects the insubstantial andintellectually empty nature of much of the writing on multiculturaleducation. As I have mentioned already, few would deny the psychologicaland social benefits potentially associated with a heightenedcultural awareness. In order for this to be realized, however, a minimumrequirement is that any multicultural initiative be firmly embeddedwithin an appropriate, valued and systematic context. This contextalready exists, in fact, in existing curricula, although there are immediatelyobvious difficulties that can quickly vitiate programs. The thoughtfulremoval of boundaries of convenience, for example, would seemparamount. Cross-cultural sensitivity might be said to rest upon cross- ormultidisciplinary underpinnings: meaningful interconnections amongsocial studies, history and geography, for example, would facilitate theemergence of multicultural themes. This is hardly a radical notion: canwe conceive, in fact, of a meaningful history that is not multicultural? Infact, as I mentioned in the introduction, all education worthy of the nameis multicultural.Properly integrated programs, incidentally, would go some waytowards alleviating the concerns of minority-group members themselves,many of whom have quite rightly been suspicious from the start. InBritain, the West Indian writer, Maureen Stone (1981: 77) argued ageneration ago that schools should continue to stress ‘core’ knowledge.She rejected the vague ‘affective’ goals of much modern multiculturaleducation:I want to suggest that MRE [multiracial education] is conceptuallyunsound... while at the same time creating for teachers, both radicaland liberal, the illusion that they are doing something special for aparticularly disadvantaged group.