Multiculturalism

Social Foundations of Multicultural Education

By formulating the scientific concept of culture and destroying the myth of race as a determinant of behavior, cultural anthropologists during the 1920s began to lay the intellectual foundations for multicultural/global education. Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and their colleagues provided a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: How can people of different appearances, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along together peaceably? This understanding of ourselves as a species capable of creating and carrying culture opened the way for thinking and believing more inclusively about the world. But it was not until the 1960s and1970s that the image of a multicultural/global perspective burst on our consciousness. Visionary thinkers, best-selling books, and unexpected events sharpened and expanded our understanding.

In 1962, Rachel Carson astonished the public by describing the harmful consequences of the use of pesticides. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan described a “global village” with its people linked through communications technology. In 1964, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote of the convergence of human aspirations and history into the noosphere, a progressive unification of humankind and intensification of our collective consciousness. In 1965 and 1969,Barbara Ward and R. Buckminster Fuller, respectively, conceived the metaphor of Spaceship Earth as a closed life support system with its inhabitants accelerating through time and space depending on each other for survival. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich called our attention to the stunning exponential growth rate of world population and impending ecological catastrophe. In 1970, Alvin Toffler warned of impending future shock. In 1972, Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos coined the now familiar notion of “thinking globally, acting locally.” In 1972, the Club of Rome ignited a global controversy regarding the rapid depletion of our nonrenewable resources. And in 1974, the biologist Lewis Thomas portrayed the earth as a single living cell. Critical events on a national/global scale played an important role in raising our consciousness.

The challenge of multicultural/global education is, and will continue to be, the acceptance, respect, and love that can be learned at young ages, as can bigotry, racism, and hatred. Robert Haveman and Barbara Wolfe argued that children's life success is determined by three primary factors: a social or government investment in their lives, a parental investment, and the choices that the children make over time. These authors highlighted that, in addition to parental influence, social institutions such as schools play a significant role in children's lives, so that the importance of good schools and teachers is without question extremely important.