Multicultural Education

In the period from 1960 to 1975, there occurred several important and major changes in the educational system. According to Banks (1981), these changes were due to several factors, the most contributive of which were: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the growth of new educational philosophies which stressed student participation in educational planning and the relaxation of institutional controls, and the push, in large part by minority groups, for schools to develop a curriculum better suited to the needs of their particular cultural group.

One of the major changes ushered into the system as a result of the just delineated factors was the call for multicultural education. Perhaps no-where is this call better voiced nor the objectives of multicultural education more succinctly delineated than in what Havighurst (1978) termed his proposed curriculum for a post-industrial society. Specifically, Havighurst (1978) wrote that:

The curriculum should support a constructive

and democratic cultural pluralism. This

a) mutual appreciation and understanding of every subculture by the other ones

b) freedom for each subculture to practice its culture and

. . .
It can be seen that one obvious perspective of the multicultural ideology is a need for reform in the school curriculum (Baker, 1983; Sadker & Sadker, 1982). The purpose here is to make the curriculum more in line with multicultural goals. An example of how the curriculum changes might be effected by teachers in general and beginning teachers in particular may be seen if one considers the multicultural approach of an English teacher. The multiculturally oriented English teacher when drawing up her list of novels to be read by students during the school year would do such things as attempting to include novels written by people of various ethnicities and cultural backgrounds; an attempt would also be made to include stories written by females. All too often what has been given to students as "the classics" have been stories and novels written by white males who, regardless of the excellence of their writing skills, simply do not present a wide variety of cultural perspectives in their stories. Another facet of curriculum reform concerns text materials and instructional displays. In this regard, authors espousing multicultural education (Seaburg, Smith, & Gallaher, 1980) have noted that these materials must be free of
. . .

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Approximate Word count = 1255
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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