Multicultural Truth

Multicultural education is a no-brainer that can present the different truths present in the world to students of any age. Each perspective has its own truth, depending on whose interests are being considered, and there is great value in developing critical thinking skills by having students dig for, dissect, and discuss these differing points of view. We need students to learn not only how to understand another point of view so they can become thoughtful discussants, but also to become thoughtful listeners. Then they can be thoughtful disseminators of information.

As adults, they will have to wade through a mob of talking heads broadcasting, blogging, editorializing, and speaking their viewpoints – sometimes vehemently, sometimes calmly, sometimes with education and experience, sometimes with ignorance, sometimes very persuasively and authoritatively, sometimes transparently - and they will have to make decisions, vote, and act on a daily basis based on their beliefs and their understanding of their neighbors and the society surrounding them.

They will experience their own truth. But as members of a very big world that is very close by, they should experience their truth from an informed standpoint, collecting the bias and recognizing it, understanding the importance of history and personal culture, and acknowledging their responsibility and membership in what E.D. Hirsch, Jr. refers to as the “cosmopolis.”

Multicultural education, however, stops short of allowing for differences where policy is concerned. Students whose families want to pull them out of school in order to make a trip home for several days or weeks find resistance from administrators and often resentment from teachers. Attendance laws impose a form of social control and extended leaves result in the student being withdrawn from school only to re-enroll on his return. Teachers get frustrated at the lack of priority where school in concerned, seeing too many students leave for visits and trip and other non-emergencies. Administrators have to worry about truant and attendance laws. In another matter related to social control, Nashville’s new superintendant probably views the isolation of ELL students in separate classrooms for instruction as a form of social control. Those students will likely be immersed for their entire school day in the upcoming year.

Multicultural education is a way of teaching that should involve not only history, but literature and other viewpoints. Multicultural education seeks to understand everyone’s truths.