America's schools have always been subject to fads and crazes, and "multiculturalism" is the latest. Of course, America is a multicultural society, and we have been from the beginning. Our textbooks and curriculums now reflect this fact, and they should. But that's not what the new multiculturalism is about. It has nothing to do with the public schools' traditional role of helping children from various ethnic groups learn to live and work together and everything to do with strengthening and enhancing what separates them. This is dangerous for our schools and our society, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., points out in his brilliant and troubling book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).
It's true that, at one time, American history was presented as a story of white men ruling and making all the important contributions. This kind of history was essentially a patriotic saga -- Schlesinger calls it "top-dog history" -- showing the inevitable upward progress of the nation. It was designed to create loyalty and patriotism, and it did that. But it was incomplete and it was not honest. It ignored the fact that America had not always lived up to its ideals -- that some groups, notably African-Americans and native Americans, were deprived of their rights under the Constitution. And it ignored the contributions of a number of racial and ethnic groups. These distortions have largely been corrected in our history books and curriculums, and I don't know anybody today who would defend that kind of patriotic saga of progress.
But the new multiculturalists want to go to the other extreme -- from the extreme of glorifying America to the extreme of putting down everything American. For them, "Americanize" is a dirty word. They want to present this country as a place where only bad things have happened to people who are not white Europeans. Instead of teaching children that they all share a civic culture to which every group has contributed, they want to make kids believe that the common culture is a sham and that their true identity and true self-interest lie in the fact they belong to different cultures.
New multiculturalists also want to turn history -- and other subjects as well -- into mythology. They say that large numbers of Hispanic and African-American children are not doing well in school because they lack self- esteem. The way to remedy this problem is to present children with stories in which everything done by people in their group is heroic and glorious. Of course it's desirable to have pride in your ancestors, but there's no evidence it will lead you to do better in math or English. And multicultural efforts to engender that pride can lead to claims that are baseless and even ludicrous. The Portland Baseline Essays, for example, maintain that the ancient Egyptians (who are identified by the essays as black Africans) developed the theory of evolution thousands of years before Darwin, as well as quantum physics and aviation.
The danger of this kind of curriculum to our kids and our society is obvious. Schools are educating our future leaders -- our scholars, scientists, business people and politicians. They should be teaching young people how to evaluate evidence and how to separate fact from fiction. But there is little chance that kids will get these basic intellectual tools if the evidence for a historical event ( or a scientific theory) is less important than the ethnic group of the person presenting it.
The new multiculturalism is also a threat to public education. Americans have always seen public schools as places where children from various groups would learn to live together and value each other and where they would become acquainted with the common civic culture. If public schools become places where children learn that, fundamentally, they are not American, there will be no reason for taxpayers to continue supporting them. And there will be little to hold our society together.
Jan Urban, the leader of the Civic Forum, which was the major force in Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, was in this country a couple of years ago for the AFT convention. This was before the demise of the Soviet Union or the disintegration of Yugoslavia. He attended some discussions of the new multicultural curriculums, and he could not believe his ears. He said, "Do you realize that every country in Europe -- Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania -- is looking at this great miracle, which is the U.S. We cannot understand how different people can live together for hundreds of years and think of themselves as one. We are trying to understand how to emulate you so we can remain unified and not return to the racism, pogroms and wars of the past. And as we look to you for an answer, you are about to turn around and head in our direction."
Will Americans heed what Jan Urban has to tell us? Perhaps we can draw some hope from the fact that public opposition to this destructive brand of multiculturalism is no longer limited mainly to conservatives. Distinguished liberals and leftists like Schlesinger, Irving Howe and Euguene Genovese -- people who see the faults in our society but do not want to use our schools to teach falsehood or heighten racial conflict -- have jointed the fray.
A lot of school districts are adopting, or thinking of adopting, one of these new multicultural curriculums because they think the curriculums are harmless or might even do a little bit of good. Before they do so, they owe it to themselves -- and their students -- to read The Disuniting of America.