Classic Edition Sources : Multicultural Education

This reader provides over 40 selections of enduring intellectual value--classic articles, book excerpts, and research studies--that have shaped the study of multicultural education and our contemporary understanding of it.

Chapter 1. Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Multicultural Education

46443 1. Joel Spring, from “The Great Civil Rights Movement and The New Culture Wars,” Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality (McGraw-Hill, 2004)

“African and Mexican Americans were primarily concerned with ending racial segregation in the schools. Native and Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans wanted to reverse previous efforts by federal and state governments to destroy their languages and cultures.”

23701 2. Maxine Greene, from “The Passions of Pluralism,” Educational Researcher (1993)

“I want to find a way of speaking of community, and expanding community, taking shape when diverse people, speaking as who and not what they are, come together in speech and action.”

46444 3. Kathy Hytten, from “The Promise of Cultural Studies of Education,” Educational Theory (Fall 1999)

“[Cultural studies is] underscored by a vision of the possibility of developing a truly democratic social life in which the voices and contributions of all citizens are taken into account, and in which all forms of oppression and exploitation are diminished.”

Chapter 2. Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives on Multicultural Education

23702 4. Samuel Bowles, from “Unequal Education and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor,” Schooling in a Corporate Society: The Political Economy of Education in America, 2nd ed. (David McKay, 1972)

“Thus, unequal education has its roots in the very class structure which it serves to legitimize and reproduce. Inequalities in education are part of the web of capital society.”

23703 5. John U. Ogbu, from “Adaption to Minority Status and Impact on School Success,” Theory Into Practice (1992)

“Voluntary and involuntary minorities differ not only in initial terms of incorporation into American society but also in the cultural models of what it means to be a minority.”

Chapter 3. Ethnographic Perspectives on Multicultural Education

23704 6. Jonathan Kozol, from Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (Crown Publishers, 1991)

“What startled me most-although it puzzles me that I was not prepared for this - was the remarkable degree of racial segregation that persisted almost everywhere.”

25364 7. Penelope Eckert, from Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School (Teachers College Press, 1989)

“The Jock and Burnout categories are more than a simple reflection of parents’ socioeconomic identity; they are pivotal in the transition from childhood to adult status, and both upward and downward mobility are achieved through the mediation of these categories.”

46442 8. Guadalupe Valdés, from “The Town, the School, and the Students,” Learning and Not Learning English (Teachers College Press, 2001)

“Beginning in late 1980s, Mission Vista schools experienced a rapid population change...The arrival of Mexican immigrants from a largely rural background was felt in many ways by the community...Permanent residents were not prepared for the changes when they happened.”

Chapter 4. Culture

23706 9. Edward T. Hall, from “What is Culture?” The Silent Language (Doubleday, 1959)

“[C]ulture has long stood for the way of life of a people, for the sum of their learned behavior patterns, attitudes, and material things.”

23707 10. Henry T. Trueba, from “The Dynamics of Cultural Transmission,” Healing Multicultural America (The Falmer Press, 1993)

“This means that culture is not merely passed from one generation to another, with some changes and revisions. Culture is continuously reshaped and reinterpreted, precisely in the context of socializing others, especially the young, to the American way of life.”

Chapter 5. Racism and Predjudice

23710 11. Cornel West, from Race Matters (Beacon Press, 1993)

“Our truncated public discussions of race suppress the best of who and what we are as a people because they fail to confront the complexity of the issue in a candid and critical manner.”

23711 12. Peggy McIntosh, from White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

“I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious.”

15043 13. Christine Sleeter, from “White Racism,” Multicultural Education (Spring 1994)

“By White racism (or White supremacy), I am referring to the system of rules, procedures, and tacit beliefs that result in Whites collectively maintaining control over the wealth and power of the nation and the world.”

46448 14. Jana Noel, from “Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Racism,” Developing Multicultural Educators (Waveland Press, 2005)

“The five theories presented here explain possible reasons for the development of prejudice: racial and cultural difference, economic competition, traumatic experience, frustration-aggression, and social control...prejudice formation is not a simple matter.”

Chapter 6. Identity Development

24639 15. Jean S. Phinney, from “Ethnic Identity in Adolescents and Adults,” Psychological Bulletin (Vol. 108, No. 3, 1990)

“The stage model suggests that as a result of this process, people come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of their ethnicity.”

23713 16. Beverly Daniel Tatum, from “Teaching White Students About Racism,” Teachers College Record (1994)

“However, the process [of identity development] will unfold in different ways for whites and people of color because of the different social positions they occupy in this society.”

Part 7. The Conservative Tradition

20750 17. Arther M. Schlesinger, Jr., from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992)

“The question America confronts as a pluralistic society is how to vindicate cherished cultures and traditions without breaking the bonds of cohesion—common ideals, common political institutions, common language, common cultures, common fate—that hold the republic together.”

23714 18. E.D. Hirsch, from “American Diversity and Public Discourse,” Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

“After more than two hundred years of national life, the main elements of our vocabulary have transcended the sphere of contention and dispute.”

Chapter 8. Critical Pedagogy

46453 19. Paulo Freire, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum Publishing, 1993)

“[T]he banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world.”

23717 20. Henry A. Giroux, from “Insurgent Multiculturalism and the Promise of Pedagogy,” in David Theo Goldberg, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1994)

“[Multiculturalism] must also be used as an ethical and political referent which allows teachers and students to understand how power works in the interest of dominant social relations, and how such relations can be challenged and transformed.”

Chapter 9. Gender

46454 21. American Association of University Women, from Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children (Marlowe & Company, 1999)

“After lagging for years, girls’ high school course enrollment patterns are beginning to look more like boys’—an encouraging sign because course selections can open or close future opportunities to students. But progress is not uniform.”

46844 22. David Sadker, from “An Educator's Primer on the Gender War,” Phi Delta Kappan (Vol. 84, No. 3, 2002)

”What would school look like if ‘misguided feminists’ were actually engaged in a ‘war against boys’?... this brief overview of gender difference s does little more than confirm common-sense observations: neithe...