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Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Education, Part II I had taught high school and middle school English and social studies in a public school system for thirty-four years, retiring from the teaching profession in July of 1999. Any observations, opinions and conclusions I make about Multicultural Education are not theoretical: they are pragmatically based on experience and my interactions with over four thousand students. And I have been scrutinizing and studying Multicultural Education for four decades now and have heard too-many-times the lackluster educational jargon originating from college professors and from misguided advocates of M. E. , and quite frankly those elitist arguments have become rather redundant, hackneyed and monotonous, and to think that I once wholeheartedly espoused those ethereal Multicultural Education principles as an idealistic teacher beginning my career back in September of 1965. Despite the Happy Face that supporters of Multicultural Education are attempting to promote and propagandize, one distinct adjective comes to mind whenever I think about Multicultural Education and that particular word is insidious. To the unsuspecting layman or college student Diversity through M.
E. is a nifty catch phrase that sounds awfully noble and pleasant to the ears upon hearing its utterance, but the process known as Multicultural Education is actually quite detrimental to the implementation of effective American education. I deliberately describe the scourge as insidious because over the past forty years M. E. has imperceptibly and very cunningly been introduced, advanced and perpetuated by its militant proponents without the American public realizing exactly how harmful, how treacherous and how detrimental the seemingly benign terminology appears to be. First of all, Multicultural Education never clearly defines and identifies itself to the American public for what it really is.
U. S, citizens automatically equate and associate M. E. with Bilingual Education and ESL (English as a Second Language), which the clever campaigners for M. E. never lucidly delineate and differentiate.
Bilingual Education and ESL are indeed definite, positive, beneficial and necessary programs in our American public schools. Those two activities encourage and facilitate the cultural Melting Pot ideal whereby immigrant and certain minority students learn English and ESL and are hopefully successfully assimilated into American society after two-to-four years of exposure to a new language and a new culture. But Multicultural Education is the complete opposite and inverse of Bilingual Education and ESL. M. E.
deceitfully and deliberately does not accurately distinguish itself from Bilingual Education and ESL to the unwary American public. Heres what Multicultural education really is: It is an attempt to manipulate history, English, literature and science to make those subjects appear to all students that blacks, Hispanics and other minorities have contributed as much (if not more) to Western Civilization than Einstein, Jefferson, Washington, Thoreau, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Hugo, Twain, Newton, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Poe, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Abraham Lincoln and other Caucasians have. Multicultural Education attempts to diminish the great White benefactors of the Western World while simultaneously elevating the works of obscure minorities to their plane.
And the entire student body is exposed to and forced to suffer through this ruse in their various core curriculum textbooks and its not just ESL students and Bilingual Education learners being exposed to the ongoing brainwashing. And once the American public fully recognizes that important concept separating M. E. from Bilingual Education and ESL, Multicultural Education will finally be satisfactorily challenged and ultimately rejected. Although the Multicultural Education academic elitists claim to be visionaries, they are in effect revisionists.
Their impractical goal is to create a Utopian future by first rewriting the past and next changing the present. First relegate icons like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jefferson and Newton and then give equal stature to James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Jesse Jackson and George Washington Carver. It is true that George Washington Carver remarkably found three hundred applied uses for the peanut, but the Multicultural Education activists want us to believe that the black scientist is just as important to American culture, science, technology and history as is Galileo and Thomas Edison. I dont think so!
This is not to say that minority inventors and authors are not to be studied in schools. As a teacher I remember enjoying reading biographies of Louis Armstrong, Harriet Tubman and Ralph Bunche with my literature classes but if Multicultural Education advocates had their way that type of minority-oriented reading should constitute the bulk of the literature, history and science curriculums taught in our schools. To get their way the M. E. elitists must shrewdly label and demonize traditional curriculum by calling it Eurocentric, which automatically connotes a bad moniker. The long-range objective of the M.
E. masterminds is to first condemn Eurocentric history, literature and science and then to systematically dismantle Western Civilization, which is really what the stereotype Eurocentric means. I have eight elementary questions that pertain to significant developments in the history of mankind to ask the Multicultural elitists: 1) Where did the concept of Democracy begin? (Clue: the city is the capital of Greece) 2) Where did the Renaissance happen? (Clue: a country that has cities Florence, Rome and Venice) 3) Where did the Age of Exploration and Discovery begin? (Clue: cities like Genoa, Lisbon and London) 4) Where did the Age of Enlightenment have its roots? (Clue: Cities are found on rivers Seine and Thames) 5) Where did the Protestant Reformation take place? (Clue: Main players were Martin Luther of Germany and Henry the VIII of England) 6) Where did the Industrial Revolution get started? (Clue: a country that has cities named Manchester, Coventry, Sheffield, Leeds and New Castle) 7) Where did the Atomic Age happen? (Clue: the country has an eagle and an old chap named Uncle Sam as its symbols) 8) Where did the Computer Age have its origins? (Clue: corporations named IBM, Microsoft and Apple inspired it to happen). The phenomenal freedoms that Americans enjoy today are outgrowths from the eight Eurocentric eras enumerated above. The concept of Democracy originated in ancient Greece. The Renaissance liberated the human spirit and gave birth to cultural creativity.
The Age of Discovery and Exploration sent men on great adventures to distant continents. The Age of Enlightenment led to the development of modern-day political philosophy. The Protestant Reformation loosened church authority and created an atmosphere where thinkers could contemplate and publish their works, scientists could freely experiment and inventors could create. This newfound freedom of thought and expression eventually led to the development of Constitutional governments where the rights of citizens were protected under law. This fantastic revolutionary Western Civilization liberty led to freedom of thought, which led to discovery, which led to technology, which led to progress and to our contemporary American (and European) way of life and high standard of living. But if the determined Multicultural Education zealots had their druthers, the eight important eras of Western Civilization would be diminished and relegated because they are Eurocentric while the accomplishments of minorities will be elevated, given accolades and praised in our public schools, thus dooming our students to perpetual mediocrity.
Now knowing the above-mentioned salient facts the majority of adult Americans would prefer having their children exposed to the same kind of Eurocentric education that they had received and understood as Western Civilization. Every mature U. S. citizen with any scruples wishes to have the culture and history of America expertly transmitted to the younger generation, for that particular function is the central purpose of schools besides teaching students vital skills in reading, writing, speaking, mathematics, science and thinking. But if the adamant M.
E. crusaders had their way teachers would have to pretend that Western Civilization never happened and that minorities were equally responsible for the prosperity that America presently maintains and enjoys. And those stubborn Multicultural Education advocates are very inflexible and quite obstinate too. They want you to believe that M. E. is a powerful new science and not a topic that s...
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Research essay sample on Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Part Ii
