It's easy to be in favor of multicultural and global education, in principle. The trouble comes when you try to say exactly what you mean by the term so you can put it into action.
If you want to feel convinced about the value of multicultural and global education, all you have to do is to look at the strife that is bred by ethnic, racial and religious differences. Look at Eastern Europe, at India, at some of our own cities. If only we understood where other people were coming from -- if only we had more sensitivity to their cultures-we might not be so wedded to our own points of view. And we might have a better chance of avoiding the conflicts that come from ethnocentrism.
However, when we come to apply this principle, there are some serious problems. The New York State Regents' goal for global education, which has also been taken up by multiculturalists, makes some of these problems very clear. According to the goal, "Each student will develop the ability to understand, respect and accept people of different races; sex; cultural heritage; national origin; religion; and political, economical and social background, and their values, beliefs and attitudes."
The goal, expressed in a lot of positive words ("understand, respect, and accept"), sounds very broad-minded, very reasonable. And up to a point, it expresses what we'd hope for from a multicultural and global education. And educated person is not narrow minded or provincial. So of course we don't want students to be prejudiced-to pre-judge the correctness of desirability of some idea or action before they know anything about it. We want them to be open to new ideas and ways of doing things.
But do we really want them to "respect and accept" the "values, beliefs and attitudes" of other people, no matter what they are? Is every value, belief and attitude as good as every other?
Do we want them to respect and accept the beliefs that led Chinese leaders to massacre dissenting students in Tiananmen Square? And what about the values and beliefs that allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini leaders in Iran to confirm this sentence? Is it okay to condemn an author to death because he wrote something that offends against your religious beliefs?
Is exposing unwanted children to the elements and certain death, a custom still widely practiced in some countries in Asia and Africa, to be respected and accepted because it is part of somebody else's culture? Is female circumcision?
Must we respect the custom of forcing young children in the Philippines or Thailand to work in conditions of virtual slavery? And must we look respectfully on Hitler's beliefs and actions?
Should we teach students to accept the sexism of the Japanese or their racist attitudes toward immigrants just because they're part of the Japanese culture? And should we encourage students, in the name of open-mindedness and cultural sensitivity, to accept Afrikaner values and the racist beliefs that undergird apartheid? (If the U.S. and other nations had been so "open-minded" over the years, would these values and beliefs now be changing in South Africa?)
People who support this kind of approach to multicultural and global education may think they are being objective-even scientific. They may think they are freeing themselves from the limitations of their own culture and its values. But by not taking a position, they are taking one. They are saying that apartheid is okay; that there is nothing wrong with murdering someone who has committed blasphemy.
They're also teaching their students not to make moral judgements. If any custom or law of people in any culture is as defensible as any other, what kind of judgement is possible? So, without intending to, they encourage students in prejudice of a different sort: Instead of mindlessly assuming that other ways of doing things have to be wrong, students will mindlessly assume these ways of doing things have to be right-or at least as good as anyone else's. And by approving practices that would not be tolerated here or in any other democracy, they are saying that some people should be held to lower standards than others-a kind of moral superiority that is hardly consistent with multicultural and global education.
It's important that we teach our children about each other's and other people's customs and values. We are unlikely to survive if we don't. But this does not mean teaching students that they need not hold other people's practices-and our own-up to moral scrutiny. If we do this, we confuse objectivity with neutrality. And how we possibly justify neutrality about the difference between being able to speak and write as we please and having to restrain our tongues and our pens on pain of death?