MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION? it's humbug and here's why

Teachers are urged to practice "multicultural education." They're told their classroom should be a rainbow where kids from multiple cultures each add a complimentary color. Advocates such as Professor Sonia Nieto, author of the popular Affirming Diversity, claim that "cultural, ... differences can and should be honored, respected, and used as a basis for learning and teaching." This prescription is based on two false assumptions. The first: all cultures are compatible. They aren't.  The second: all cultures incorporate the tolerance that a cultural rainbow requires. They don't. 

For instance, members of cultures little influenced by the enlightenment are likely to view multiculturalism itself with anger, fear and repulsion. Consider the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. (The retrograde dogmatic religious sect dominating Saudi Arabia and promoting that intolerance with vast amounts of oil money throughout the Muslim world.) Wahhabi true believers divide the world between good guys who subscribe to their version of Islam and Godless heretics. So how do the Wahhabi deal with unbelievers? They silence them. And if they must be flogged, jailed, even liquidated, to achieve that silence, so be it. How could you ever insert this intolerance into multicultural education without putting the whole enterprise in jeapordy?

Is this an exaggeration? In 2004 a Saudi royal study group found that the kingdom's religious studies curriculum "encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the 'other.'  Embarrassed by this finding by their own study group, high ranking Saudi officials promised to eliminate the cited intolerant dogmatism from their curriculum. But years later, when the Washington Post analyzed "reformed" Saudi religion texts, they found the self-same, intolerant preachments.  

Let's imagine someone like Professor Nieto teaching in Saudi Arabia while trying to follow her own multicultural prescription. Let's say she openly affirms the value of all religious views. What do you think her fate would be? And before you decide, consider that in 2005, a Saudi teacher cautiously suggesting that Jews and the New Testament could be viewed positively, was not only fired, but sentenced to 750 lashes and sent to prison. (He was eventually pardoned, but only following intense international protests.) 

If Professor Nieto actually "affirmed diversity" in a Saudi classroom  she would doubtless suffer for it. And since this cultural backwater is misogynistic and Professor Nieto is a woman, a severe outcome would be especially likely.  

Is Saudi Arabia unique? Is it an island of intolerance in a tolerant world? Of course not. Religious and related cultural intolerance is so common that tolerance is often a novelty. And this is especially true when believers subscribe to a religion that asserts that it, and only it, commands THE truth. 

Also, let's not forget that cultures sometimes define themselves, at least in part, by their rejection of, hatred for, and even aggression toward, other cultures. Palestinians rarely love the Jews. Armenians have serious reservations about the Turks. The Irish have a less than cordial attitudes toward the English. And let's not expect Native Americans to be grateful to the "white man" for ethnically cleansing them from most of the continent. As Simon and Garfunkel once sang: "The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch. And I don't like anybody very much!"

Should a teacher actually set out to affirm diversity how should he or she deal with another culture's practice of, say, hating and persecuting homosexuals? (Some cultures even put them to death!) That murderous intolerance sure doesn't blend well in any imaginary cultural rainbow. What about pre-marital sex. That's a pretty common practice. But an Iranian couple accused of enjoying each other were sentenced to be buried up to their necks in sand, and stoned to death. Should any American teacher affirm that kind of diversity? 

There are cultures and subcultures that condone selling one's own daughter into prostitution, throwing battery acid in the face of girls who merely want to go to school, killing one's sister for "dishonoring" the family, hiring amateurs to carve out the clitoris of little girls with razor blades, forbidding female inclusion in a last will and testament, assigning women second rate legal standing, ad naseum. Should these differences be accepted, respected, and used as a basis for learning and teaching? Of course not. But advocates of multiculturalism either pretend such practices don't exist, or are too ignorant to be aware of it. At bottom, their prescription is simply more of the simple-minded happy talk that badly hampers serious educational discourse.

America is more of a salad bowl then a melting pot and, more of less, always has been. But that doesn't change the fact that there are some ingredients that will ruin the salad and render it uneatable.