Multicultural Education

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION

"Multicultural education is a progressive approach for transforming education that holistically critiques and addresses current shortcomings, failings, and discriminatory practices in education. It is grounded in ideals of social justice, education equity, and a dedication to facilitating educational experiences in which all students reach their full potential as learners and as socially aware and active beings, locally, nationally, and globally. Multicultural education acknowledges that schools are essential to laying the foundation for the transformation of society and the elimination of oppression and injustice." - Paul Gorski (2000)

Banks and Banks (1995) define multicultural education:

"Multicultural education is a field of study and an emerging discipline whose major aim is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. One of its important goals is to help all students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to interact, negotiate, and communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good." (p. xi)

"Multicultural education not only draws content, concepts, paradigms, and theories from specialized interdisciplinary fields such as ethnic studies and women studies (and from history and the social and behavioral sciences), it also interrogates, challenges, and reinterprets content, concepts, and paradigms from the established disciplines. Multicultural education applies content from these fields and disciplines to pedagogy and curriculum development in educational settings. Consequently, we may define multicultural education as a field of study designed to increase educational equity for all students that incorporates, for this purpose, content, concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms from history, the social and behavioral sciences, and particularly from ethnic studies and women studies." (p. xii)

The Importance of a Year Round Multicultural Education
The importance of our children receiving a year-round education can not be over stated. Often times, the study of a particular ethnic or racial group is confined to a certain month, and virtually ignored at other times. Although at first glance this seems to give our children a well-rounded view of all cultures, in fact it is more divisive. If February is "Black History Month", isn't it implied that Black History simply isn't addressed at other times of the year? Our goal should be to eventually incorporate the studies of all ethnic and racial groups into a year-round multicultural education so that all of our children will receive a truly balanced education.

You may find a list of important reference works on individual ethnic and racial groups at American Multicultural Publications.