The Stable Debate on Multicultural Education
by Shannon Joyce Prince
“Multicultural education is linked to racial justice and power.”
In the Mis-Education of the Negro Carter G. Woodson describes how an interviewer once asked him, "Why do you emphasize the special study of the Negro?"i The interviewer added, "Why is it necessary to give the race special attention in the press, on the rostrum, or in the schoolroom? This idea of projecting the Negro into the foreground does the race much harm by singing continually of his woes and problems and thus alienating the public which desires to give its attention to other things."ii Woodson doesn’t reveal what he told the interviewer. Instead, he directs his response at the reader saying, “The Negro has been assigned to the lowest drudgery as the sphere in which the masses must toil to make a living; and socially and politically the race has been generally proscribed. Inasmuch as the traducers of the race have ‘settled’ the matter in this fashion, they naturally oppose any effort to change this status… A Negro with sufficient thought to construct a [multicultural] program of his own is undesirable, and the educational systems of this country generally refuse to work through such Negroes in promoting their cause.”iii
The interviewer’s words contain several common and negative assumptions about multicultural education: the idea that multicultural education is “special study,” an accessory to core knowledge; the idea that “the Negro” or other minorities exist naturally in the background while multicultural education artificially “projects” them “into the foreground”; the idea that multicultural education is a litany of whines; and the idea that multicultural education serves to “alienate” minorities from “the [white] public” which is indifferent, if not hostile, to multicultural concerns.
Yet for Woodson, multicultural education is linked to racial justice and power. It is a cure for blacks’ exclusion from the curriculum that results in them receiving an incomplete, distorted, and substandard education, condemning them to the meanest strata of the spheres of employment, socio-economic standing, and political status. Multicultural education has the power to “unsettle” the caste system. For this reason, multicultural education faces opposition from those who would see non-whites remain on the bottom rungs of society.
“Multicultural education has the power to “unsettle” the caste system.”
W. E. B. Du Bois also recognized the need for blacks to have what Woodson called “programs” of their own. In his 1935 article “Does the Negro Need Special Schools?” Du Bois states that special schools for blacks “are needed just so far as they are necessary for the proper education of the Negro race. The proper education of any people includes sympathetic touch between teacher and pupil; knowledge on the part of the teacher, not simply of the individual taught, but of his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group; such contact between pupils, and between teacher and pupil, on the basis of perfect social equality, as will increase this sympathy and knowledge...” iv It is clear that, like Woodson, Du Bois wants black students to learn their own history and culture, that is, to have a multicultural curriculum. As “proper education of the Negro race” wasn’t a priority in mainstream schools, Du Bois uses his article to explicitly call for ethnocentric schools.
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Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Tuesday, April 17th 2012 at 3:38AM
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