ARTHUR SCHLESINGER,
JR.
A Dissent on Multicultural Education
I agree with many of the practical recommendations in the report of the
New York State Social Studies Syllabus Review Committee. It is
unquestionably necessary to diversify the syllabus in order to meet the '
needs of a more diversified society. It is unquestionably necessary to
provide for global education in an increasingly interdependent world.
Our students should by
all
means be better acquainted with women's
history, with the history of ethnic and racial minorities, with Latin
American, Asian, and African history. Debate, alternative interpretations,
"multiple perspectives" are all essential to the educational enterprise. I
welcome changes that would adapt the curriculum to these purposes. If
that is what the report means by multicultural education, I am
all
for it.
But I fear that the report implies much more than this. The under–
lying philosophy of the report, as I read it, is that ethnicity is the defining
experience for most Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and
indelible, that the division into ethnic groups establishes the basic struc–
ture of American society, and that a main objective of public education
should be the protection, strengthening, celebration, and perpetuation of
ethnic origins and identities. Implicit in the report is the classification of
all
Americans according to ethnic and racial criteria.
These propositions are assumed rather than argued in the report.
They constitute an ethnic interpretation of American history that, like
the economic interpretation, is valid up to a point but misleading and
wrong when presented as the whole picture.
The ethnic interpretation, moreover, reverses the historic theory of
America - which has been not the preservation and sanctification of old
cultures and identities but the creation of a
new
national culture and a
new
national identity. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams told a
German contemplating migration to these shores, those who would set–
tle in America must recognize one necessity: "They must cast off the Eu–
ropean skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their
posterity rather than backward to their ancestors."
Of course students should learn more about the rich variety of
peoples and cultures that have forged this new American identity. They
also should understand the curse of racism - the great failure of the
American experiment, the glaring contradiction of American ideals and
the still crippling disease of American society. But we should also be alert
to the danger of a society divided into distinct and immutable ethnic and
racial groups, each taught to cherish its own apartness from the rest.
..
