The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education

James A. Banks, James A. Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135897277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume is the first authoritative reference work to provide a truly comprehensive international description and analysis of multicultural education around the world. It is organized around key concepts and uses case studies from various nations in different parts of the world to exemplify and illustrate the concepts. Case studies are from many nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Bulgaria, Russia, South Africa, Japan, China, India, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico. Two chapters focus on regions – Latin America and the French-speaking nations in Africa. The book is divided into ten sections, covering theory and research pertaining to curriculum reform, immigration and citizenship, language, religion, and the education of ethnic and cultural minority groups among other topics.

With fortynewly commissioned pieces written by a prestigious group of internationally renowned scholars, The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education provides the definitive statement on the state of multicultural education and on its possibilities for the future.

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Part 1
Multicultural education
Theoretical perspectives and issues

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1
Multicultural education
Dimensions and paradigms


James A. Banks
University of Washington, Seattle, USA

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In nation-states around the world, there is increasing diversity as well as increasing recognition of diversity. Since the ethnic revitalization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic groups have articulated their grievances and pushed for equality and structural inclusion. The Black civil rights movement in the US – which echoed throughout the world (Painter, 2006) – stimulated the ethnic revitalization movements. The French and First Nations¹ in Canada, the West Indians and Asians in Britain, the Indonesians and Surinamese in the Netherlands, and the Aboriginal peoples in Australia joined the string of ethnic movements, expressed their rage and anger, and demanded that the institutions within their nation-states – such as schools, colleges, and universities – become more responsive to their needs, hopes, and dreams.

When the ethnic revitalization movements began in the 1960s and 1970s, the Western nations were characterized by tremendous ethnic, cultural, racial, religious, and linguistic diversity. This diversity resulted from several historical developments. The nations in Western Europe had longstanding linguistic and cultural minorities, such as the Basques in France and Spain, the Germans in Denmark, the Danes in Germany, and the Welsh, Scots, and Jews in the United Kingdom. Europe has historically been a crossroad and meeting ground – sometimes violent – of diverse cultural groups (Figueroa, 2008). Diversity in Europe was increased when thousands of migrants from colonial nations came to Europe to improve their economic and social status in the years after World War II.

Many of the nations in Asia have been diverse historically. Although the Han Chinese make up about 92% of the Chinese population, China has 56 officially designated ethnic groups (Postiglione, chap. 37, this volume). Malaysia is both ethnically and religiously diverse. Its population consists of approximately 50.4% Malay, 23.7% Chinese, 11% Bumiputera, 7.1% Indian, and 7.8% other ethnic groups (Hudson, 2007). Malaysia’s religious groups include Muslim (53%), Buddhist (17.3%), Confucian and Taoist (11.6%), Christian (8.6%), and Hindu (7%). The Chinese (76.8%) are the largest ethnic group in Singapore, followed by the Malay (13.9%), and Indians (7.9%) (Hudson). Although Japan has historically viewed itself as a homogeneous and monoethnic nation-state (Murphy-Shigematsu, 2006), immigrants have lived in Japan for more than a century (Befu, 2006). Its minorities include the Ainu, Okinawans, Burakumin, Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese (Lie, 2001).

The United States, Canada, and Australia were diverse when the European explorers and settlers arrived in these distant lands. The diversity in these nations was enriched by the Indigenous peoples that the European settlers displaced, by Black people from Africa in the US, and by the large numbers of immigrants and refugees from nations around the world who settled in these three nations to realize their religious, political, and economic dreams. The US, Canada, and Australia have become more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse within the last 40 years. Although English was the most frequently spoken home language in Australia in 2006 (78.5%), the census indicated that more than 400 languages were spoken in homes, including Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, Italian, Greek, and Arabic (Inglis, chap. 7, this volume).

In 2008, Canada’s population was very diverse. Individuals of British Isles origin made up 28% of the population, 23% were of French origin, and 15% were other European. The other 34% of the population was made up of individuals of various ethnic groups and of mixed backgrounds (Statistics Canada, 2008). The US is experiencing its largest influx of immigrants since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of the immigrants to the US today are coming from Asia and Latin America, whereas most came from Europe in previous centuries. The U.S. census (2007) projects that ethnic minorities will increase from one-third of the nation’s population in 2006 to 50% in 2042. Ethnic minorities made up 100 million of the total U.S. population of just over 300 million in 2006. U.S. schools are more diverse today than they have been since the early 1900s when a flood of immigrants entered the US from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. In the 30-year period between 1973 and 2004, the percentage of ethnic minority students in U.S. public schools increased from 22% to 43% (Dillon, 2006).

Ethnic, racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity is found in nations around the world. It extends far beyond the nations highlighted in the brief overview above. There is myriad diversity in Latin America and African nations, as the chapters in this Companion indicate. The educational challenges experienced by Indigenous and ethnic groups in Peru, Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico – and related educational reforms – are described in Chapters 20, 38, 39, and 40 respectively. Chapters 10 and 28 describe the educational challenges and reforms related to diversity in South Africa and in the Francophone nations in Africa.

Worldwide immigration and education

The movement of peoples across national boundaries is as old as the nation-state itself (Castles & Davidson, 2000). However, never before in the history of world migrations have the movement of diverse racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups within and across nation-states been as numerous and rapid or raised such complex and difficult questions about citizenship, human rights, democracy, and education (Banks, chap. 22, this volume). In 2005, there were approximately 191 million migrants living outside the nation in which they were born, which was 3% of the world’s population (Martin & Zurcher, 2008).

Many worldwide trends and developments are challenging the notion of educating students to function in one nation-state. They include the ways people are moving back and forth across national borders (Castles, chap. 3, this volume), the rights of movement permitted by the European Union, and the rights codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These trends indicate that we should be educating students to be cosmopolitan citizens in a global community (Appiah, 2006).

The assimilationist and liberal vision of society

The Western nations were characterized by myriad racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity when the ethnic revival movements emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. However, they were dominated by an assimilationist ideology. A major national goal in the US, Canada, and Australia was to create a nation-state in which one culture – the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic – was dominant. The diverse groups that made up these nations were expected to forsake their original cultures and languages in order to become effective citizens of their nation-states. The older nation-states in Western Europe – such as the United Kingdom (Carby, 1982), France, Germany, and The Netherlands – were also dominated by an assimilationist ideology. Their goal was to maintain their national identities and the cultural hegemony of existing dominant groups.

The assimilationist and liberal ideology that dominated the Western nations envisioned a nation-state in which individuals from diverse groups are able to participate fully. However, the liberal-assimilationist believes that, in order for this kind of equitable, modernized society to emerge and flourish, individuals must surrender their ethnic and cultural attachments. Ethnic attachments and traditionalism, argues the liberal, are inconsistent with a modernized society and a civic culture. Traditional cultures promote historic prejudices, we–they attitudes, and cultural conflict (Porter, 1975). They also lead to the Balkanization of the nation-state. Traditionalism and cultural pluralism also stress group rights over the rights of the individual, and regard the group rather than the individual as primary (Patterson, 1977). In a modernized, equitable society, individual rights are paramount; group rights are secondary.

Liberals also argue that traditionalism promotes inequality, racial and ethnic awareness, group favoritism, and ethnic stratification. As long as attachments to cultural and ethnic groups are salient and emphasized, argues the liberal-assimilationist, they will serve as the basis for employment and educational discrimination as well as other forms of exclusion that are inconsistent with democratic ideals and values (Glazer, 1975). The solution to this problem, argues the liberal-assimilationist, is a common national culture into which all individuals are culturally and structurally assimilated and public policies that are neutral on questions of race and ethnicity.

The rise of ethnic revitalization movements

The scope and intensity of the ethnic protest movements during the 1960s and 1970s revealed that the liberal ideology that dominated Western social science and national policies had serious limitations and neither adequately explained nor predicted the course of events or the status of ethnic groups in modern democratic societies. Western social scientists studying race relations in the 1940s and 1950s viewed the assimilation of ethnic groups as both desirable and inevitable. They were heavily influenced by the writings of Park (1950), the noted sociologist at the University of Chicago who believed that the four basic processes of social interaction were contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation.

It was not only national policy makers and social scientists who endorsed an assimilationist ideology during the 1940s and 1950s. Most ethnic groups themselves, as well as their leaders, accepted assimilation into their national societies as a desirable goal and worked hard to achieve it. There were important exceptions of groups that pursued separatism, such as the French in Canada, the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) quest for Basque independence in Spain, the Garvey movement in the United States, and other isolated separatist movements in Western nations that began prior to World War II. However, until the 1960s, most ethnic groups in the

Western nations worked to attain cultural assimilation and structural integration into their societies.

Ethnic groups tried to become assimilated into their national societies in large part because of powerful economic and political incentives. The strong appeal of attaining social mobility within the industrialized nation-states such as the United States, Canada, and Australia motivated many citizens of these nations to rid themselves of most aspects of their ethnic cultures and to become ashamed of their folk cultures and traditions. There has been historically – and continues to be – a cogent push toward assimilation in most nations because of the strong appeal of social and economic mobility.

The assimilationist and liberal ideology that has been dominant in Western nations such as the United States, Canada, and Australia has been successful for most White ethnic groups, who have achieved a significant degree of cultural and structural assimilation into their societies (Carr & Lund, 2007). However, the assimilationist ideology has worked much less well for non-White groups. Even when they are highly culturally assimilated, they may still experience high levels of structural exclusion. Although African Americans and the Indigenous groups in the United States (Native American and Alaska Natives) were expected to assimilate culturally, they were frequently denied the opportunity to attain a quality education, to vote, and to participate in the political process. The Canadian First Nations had a similar experience, as did the Australian Aboriginal peoples. The Western nations created expectations and goals for marginalized ethnic groups of color but often made it impossible for these groups to attain them. The structural exclusion of ethnic groups of color was a major cause of the ethnic revitalization movements that developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ethnic protest movements also arose in Western societies because ethnic groups that experienced discrimination and racism, such as African Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada, internalized the egalitarian and democratic ideologies that were institutionalized within their nations and believed that it was possible for these ideals to be realized. While the conditions of these groups improved in the period after World War II, they still did not have many of the benefits enjoyed by the dominant groups in their societies. In the postwar period, their governments took steps to eliminate some of the most blatant forms of discrimination and to improve their social and economic status. However, these improved conditions created rising expectations. Rising expectations outpaced the improvement within the social, economic, and political systems. The disillusionment and shattered dreams that resulted from the historic quest for assimilation caused ethnic groups to demand structural inclusion and the right to retain important aspects of their cultures, such as their languages, religions, and other important ethnic characteristics and symbols.

The failure of Western nation-states to close the gap further between their democratic ideals and societal realities and the existence of discrimination and racism do not sufficiently explain the rise of ethnic revitalization movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural and symbolic components of many of these movements indicate that they emerged in part to help individual members of ethnic groups to acquire the sense of community, moral authority, and meaning in life that highly modernized societies often leave unfulfilled. Writes Apter (1977), “[modernization] leaves what might be called a primordial space, a space people try to fill when they believe they have lost something fundamental and try to recreate it” (p. 75). As Apter points out, the liberal-assimilationist conception of the relationship between tradition and modernity is not so much wrong as it is incomplete, flawed, and oversimplified. It does not take into account the spiritual and community needs that ethnic cultures often help individuals to satisfy. The push toward assimilation in modernized societies is counterbalanced by the trenchant pull of pri-mordialism, traditionalism, and the search for community. The quest for self-determination, equality, and inclusion are also important factors that drive ethnic revitalization movements (Figueroa, 2008).

The pursuit of independence by nations in Asia and Africa during the decolonization movement that followed World War II was another important factor that stimulated ethnic revitalization movements and motivated marginalized minority groups to seek autonomy and respect for their cultures, languages, and identities (Figueroa, 2008). The decolonization movement was especially active between 1945 and 1960, when many nations in Asia and Africa became independent from the UK and nations in Europe.

The rise and characteristics of multicultural education

The early phases of multicultural education developed first in the United States as a response to the civil rights movement. They developed subsequently in other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Canada developed a multiculturalism policy in 1971; Australia in 1978. Multicultural education is an approach to school reform designed to actualize educational equality for students from diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, social-class, and linguistic groups...