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Multicultural Education Policies and Institutionalization Across Nations

Multicultural education has emerged as an important policy issue in an increasing number of countries around the world. In recent decades, multicultural education has been widely depicted as an educational approach that deals with the sociocultural diversity that exists within individual countries as well as across national borders. With accelerating economic and cultural globalization processes that involve increased human mobility and interaction, educational policymakers and researchers from around the world have been focusing more attention on the importance of multicultural competence. They have posed various questions about how nations can construct societies that incorporate diversity while also having overarching values and aims to which their diverse populations are committed.

This entry discusses multicultural education policy adoption as a response to societal and economic needs and as a means to prepare students for an increasingly global society.

Multicultural Education as a Rational Policy Response to Societal Needs

Although systematic research on the cross-national diffusion of multicultural education policies is less extensive than might be expected; most conventional perspectives assume that there is a range of intrasocietal needs that constitute the major factor driving individual countries to formulate multicultural education policies. Such views proffer useful insights from a practical stance insofar as the formulation of multicultural education policies can plausibly be understood as a functional or political response designed to meet the substantive societal needs that result from the increasing cultural diversity within individual nations. This is why most popular accounts of a country's adoption of a multicultural education policy come from a sociocultural perspective, in which formulating a multicultural education policy is understood as a necessary step toward accommodating the cultural diversity that exists within a given country in order to maintain its social cohesion. Because an important precondition for a cohesive society is mutual respect and understanding among diverse sociocultural groups, multicultural education policies can be seen as part of broader social policy frameworks meant to address issues of intercultural communication and accommodation within individual countries.

In addition, on the basis of an international economic perspective, a country's economic relations with other countries may influence the extent to which multicultural education is emphasized in the country. With the increasing consolidation of the global economy and the intensification of complex economic interdependency among countries, promoting multicultural education is often regarded as a rational policy response to the growing needs for multicultural competence in the global marketplace.

Multicultural Education Policy as a Global Institution

Yet such conventional perspectives, based on the logic of functionalism, often do not adequately account for the wider influences of institutional rules and values to which nation-states are likely to conform in order to promote ways in which they can be viewed as legitimate by their citizens. Different from yet complementary to conventional understandings of policy adoption as a rational choice to optimize immediate concrete benefits for a given country, a global institutionalist perspective offers an alternative explanation. On the basis of this perspective, the adoption of multicultural education policies is seen as an institutionalized routine whose legitimacy is closely associated with an evolving reconceptualization of citizenship in global civil society. The growing emphasis on multicultural education across national education systems may be seen as largely a phenomenon that is embedded in the wider institutional environment where the collective meaning and value of multicultural human rights is taken for granted as an integral element of educational policy. That is, the institutionalization of multicultural education policies around the world is based on the highly rationalized public discourse that posits that education should empower all future citizens to become more capable and responsible members of a multicultural global society. The usefulness of these policies within individual countries is unlikely to be questioned, even in relatively culturally homogeneous nations, because, in contemporary political conceptualizations, education is viewed as a far-sighted project that prepares students for future citizenship in global society. In this view, multicultural education policies are valuable regardless of current country-specific characteristics of individual nation-states.

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