Culture, Diversity, and Education

Cultures consist of worldviews, practices, beliefs, tastes, and behaviors shared by social groups such as ethnic groups, racial groups, age groups, interest groups, or groups based on taste preferences or religious identities. Cultural diversity leads to many challenges in education, only some of which involve ethnicity and race. Race is most often used to describe unequal groups based on perceived physical differences, whereas ethnicity is used to describe groups based on beliefs about common descent and shared cultural practices. However, there is considerable overlap between the two, and indeed racial groups such as African Americans often share beliefs about common descent and [Page 557]cultural practices, and ethnic groups such as Latinos are perceived to share physical qualities and face racial discrimination. Hence, some scholars instead use the term ethnoracial group to acknowledge the similarity between racial and ethnic groups. To understand the role of culture in education, scholars have studied the production of culture, cultural consumption, culture's influence on behavior, culture's role in status systems, and the boundaries that groups draw to define their cultures.

Studies of the production of culture emphasize the power embedded in mass culture—that is, how cultural producers such as the media and corporations influence the tastes and styles of the population. These studies might show, for example, how music industry executives promote rap music depicting violence and misogyny more than rap that describes social injustice, which can lead to negative stereotypes and racism among school officials toward African American young men. These studies suggest that those who control the means of production of cultural objects such as music videos, magazines, and television control cultural stereotypes, taking inspiration from Karl Marx's theory that those who control the means and ends of production in society control the dominant ideas of that society.

Studies of cultural consumption, however, frequently show how individuals (consumers of culture) make meaning of cultural products that do not always resonate with the meanings intended by the cultural producers. For example, University of Chicago's Black Youth Project has shown that although a majority of Black youths listen to hip hop music regularly, most dislike the violence it often portrays. Teens often make meaning of music and styles they like in ways that differ from the symbolic meanings that adults assume those tastes to have or that are different from the cultural producers' intentions.

Aside from tastes and consumption, culture is commonly thought to include a social group's values. Early cultural explanations for low academic achievement among low-income African Americans relied on “culture of poverty” arguments, suggesting that through generations of poverty, communities perpetuated their socioeconomic disadvantages by devaluing work in the mainstream economy and the importance of a two-parent household, and by destigmatizing violence, teen pregnancy, and participation in the underground economy. Others suggest that values in education and hard work lead the children of immigrants—especially Asian immigrants—to school success. These accounts suggest that Americans' values differ by ethnicity, race, and class. However, these accounts blame the poor for their disadvantage without acknowledging structural influences on poverty such as rising inequality, residential segregation, school inequality, and discrimination. Further, many studies have shown that Americans of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds have very similar values, including beliefs in the “American Dream,” marriage, and, among youth, education. Both low-achieving and high-achieving students express strong beliefs in the importance of education for success in life and a desire to complete higher education. Hence, values usually do not help explain diverse behaviors in society because similar values often underlie different behaviors.

...