United Kingdom, Multicultural Education in

In the United Kingdom, multicultural education developed from the 1960s as a pragmatic response to the arrival of children of immigrants from former colonial countries. The initial aim was the assimilation of migrant and minority children with no concessions to the values of these groups. Over the next 30 years, there was recognition of linguistic, religious, and cultural pluralism, and legislation against racial discrimination was passed. While the law used a vocabulary of race, official guidance began to refer to ethnicity, and by the turn of the century there was more open recognition that within the United Kingdom there was a diverse population, including large numbers of minority ethnic groups with different migration histories, social and economic positions, and religious and other group affiliations. In ...