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 can 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 and respected, and used as a basis for learning and teaching."

This prescription is based on two assumptions. First, that all cultures are compatible. They aren't.  Second, that all cultures incorporate the tolerance that makes a cultural rainbow feasible. They don't. Indeed, cultures little influenced by the enlightenment are likely to view multiculturalism with fear and repulsion. 

Consider the intolerant and dogmatic Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam. (The religious sect that dominates Saudi Arabia and promotes it with vast amounts of oil money throughout the Muslim world.) These true believers see the world as divided between good guys who subscribe to their hard right version of Islam, and Godless apostates or heretics. How do the Wahhabi deal with unbelievers? They silence them. And if they must be flogged, jailed, even liquidated, to achieve that, so be it.

Hope 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, high ranking Saudi officials promised to eliminate such 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 and trying to follow her own multicultural prescription. She openly affirms all religious views. What do you think her fate would be? And before you decide, consider that in 2005, a Saudi teacher cautiously suggested that Jews and the New Testament could be viewed positively. He 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 serious negative consequences. And since this is a misogynistic culture and Professor Nieto is a woman, a severe outcome would be especially likely. One wonders, if the good professor would still "affirm diversity?"  Would she stick to her prescription if it put her own neck on the chopping block? 

Is Saudi Arabia unique? Is it an island of intolerance in a tolerant world? Of course not. Religious intolerance is so common that tolerance is often a novelty. And this is especially true where 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 of, 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 intoned: "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!"

If a teacher really set out to affirm diversity how should they deal with another culture's practice of, say, hating and persecuting homosexuals? (Some cultures even put them to death!) That sure doesn't blend well in any imaginary cultural rainbow. What about pre-marital sex. That's a pretty common practice in many societies. But an Iranian couple accused of enjoying each other were sentenced to death, buried up to their necks in sand, and stoned to death. Should an American teacher affirm that 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 the multiculturalists pretend such practices don't exist. Why? Because it reveals their prescription to be simple-minded happy talk.