the society. Although the multicultural curriculum may sound good in theory it runs into several serious problems in practice.
According to Famularo, (1996) the main problem stems from the huge quantity of cultures that are represented in American classrooms today. The Asian community alone represents many cultural backgrounds such as Japanese, Chinese Phillipino and Korean, to name a few. There is no way that the curriculum is going to match each of these backgrounds. Yet to bunch them all together would completely defeat the purpose behind multi-cultural education. Any attempt create a curriculum that diverse will cause the education material to become so watered down that it will become valueless to the student.
This problem (Marriott, 1996) goes even further, since not all American students can be categorized into one ethnic background. It is common to have a large number of students of mixed racial background in a classroom. It is interesting to note that many of these students go through life being asked what exactly their race is. When they answer interracial, people continue to press the question, asking if they are latina, Israeli, or some other background. It is clear that the only reason to know this is so that they can be fit into one of the categories that society has set for them. Once placed in that category, people feel they understand their level of intelligence as well as many other important things. In this way it is felt that the teacher can decide what expectations he should put on the student's potential for learning. The result is that the interracial student is forced to make the unfair choice of which race he will claim, and therefore which race he is going to deny. Unfortunately many of these people deny their black culture to avoid being associated with failure. Somehow blackness is still associated with failure, according to interviews done by Mr. Marriott (1996).
Another problem is that...