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Institutionalizing Intergenerational Ignorance: The Persistent Struggle Surrounding U.S. Multicultural Education
Posted by Dr. Robert A. DeVillar on 2007/06/28
John Dewey (Nationalizing Education 1916, quoted in Gordon 1964:140) understood and underscored this fundamental principle of national identity and community in his speech to the National Education Association of the United States:
"Such terms as Irish-American or Hebrew-American or German-American are false terms because they seem to assume something which is already in existence called America, to which the other factor may be externally hitched on. The fact is, the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated character. This does not mean that he is part American and that some foreign ingredient is then added. It means that, as I have said, he is international and interracial in his make-up. He is not American plus Pole or German. But the American is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandavian-Bohemian-Jew and so on. The point is to see to it that the hyphen connects instead of separates. And this means at least that our public schools shall teach each factor to respect every other, and shall take pains to enlighten all as to the great past contributions of every strain in our composite make-up. I wish our teaching of American history in the schools would take more account of the great waves of migration by which our land for over three centuries has been continuously built up, and made every pupil conscious of the rich breadth of our national make-up. When every pupil recognizes all the factors which have gone into our being, he will continue to prize and reverence that coming from his own past, but he will think of it as honored in being simply one factor informing a whole, nobler and finer than itself."
Some fifty years later, Milton Gordon (Assimilation in American Life 1964: 72-73), summarizing the general scholarly perspective relative to American core culture, wrote:
"If there is anything in American life which can be described as an over-all American culture which serves as a reference point for immigrants and their children, it can best be described, it seems to us, as the middle-class cultural patterns of, largely, white Protestant, Anglo-Saxon origins, leaving aside for the moment the question of minor reciprocal influences on this culture exercised by the cultures of later entry into the United States, and ignoring also, for this purpose, the distinction between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class cultural worlds."
In sum, from its ideological roots to its post mid-20th century practice, the United States prized a specific monolithic cultural image and character associated with a particular group. Moreover, through laws and practice, this dominant soi-disant core culture controlled and restricted access—to greater or lesser degrees—by other cultural groups in the U.S. to the institutions that served to mold its own members. This contradictory model of culture—universally inclusive and pluralistic in rhetoric, selectively particularistic and monocultural in fact—within a self-designated democratic context from its inception set the stage and tone for major struggles by members of the excluded groups (and supported to differing degrees by members of the dominant culture group) to match U.S. practice with its rhetoric.*
Historically, U.S. schools—to include teachers, administrators, curricula and materials—have aided in the institutionalization of maintaining and transmitting this cultural fiction alive across generations, and continue to do even in the present. Call it the Reproduction of Naïveté. Internalized values and attitudes, of course, serve to prompt patterned actions on a mass level without question—in spite of moral or intellectual arguments, or empirical evidence, to the contrary. My next series of blog postings will provide further detail on this phenomenon and its effects.
* There are, of course, professional writers at major institutes—such as Thomas Sowell and Dinesh D’Souza, both at the Hoover Institute of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University—who are non-white (Sowell is African American) or who could be perceived as non-white (D’Souza is Asian Indian), and who are fervently conservative and ardently anti-multicultural education. See, for example, Sowell’s columns at Citizens for a Constitutional Republic http://www.citizensforaconstitutionalrepublic.com/Thomas_Sowell.html, and D’Souza’s daily blog and writings at http://www.dineshdsouza.com/.
"Such terms as Irish-American or Hebrew-American or German-American are false terms because they seem to assume something which is already in existence called America, to which the other factor may be externally hitched on. The fact is, the genuine American, the typical American, is himself a hyphenated character. This does not mean that he is part American and that some foreign ingredient is then added. It means that, as I have said, he is international and interracial in his make-up. He is not American plus Pole or German. But the American is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandavian-Bohemian-Jew and so on. The point is to see to it that the hyphen connects instead of separates. And this means at least that our public schools shall teach each factor to respect every other, and shall take pains to enlighten all as to the great past contributions of every strain in our composite make-up. I wish our teaching of American history in the schools would take more account of the great waves of migration by which our land for over three centuries has been continuously built up, and made every pupil conscious of the rich breadth of our national make-up. When every pupil recognizes all the factors which have gone into our being, he will continue to prize and reverence that coming from his own past, but he will think of it as honored in being simply one factor informing a whole, nobler and finer than itself."
Some fifty years later, Milton Gordon (Assimilation in American Life 1964: 72-73), summarizing the general scholarly perspective relative to American core culture, wrote:
"If there is anything in American life which can be described as an over-all American culture which serves as a reference point for immigrants and their children, it can best be described, it seems to us, as the middle-class cultural patterns of, largely, white Protestant, Anglo-Saxon origins, leaving aside for the moment the question of minor reciprocal influences on this culture exercised by the cultures of later entry into the United States, and ignoring also, for this purpose, the distinction between the upper-middle class and the lower-middle class cultural worlds."
In sum, from its ideological roots to its post mid-20th century practice, the United States prized a specific monolithic cultural image and character associated with a particular group. Moreover, through laws and practice, this dominant soi-disant core culture controlled and restricted access—to greater or lesser degrees—by other cultural groups in the U.S. to the institutions that served to mold its own members. This contradictory model of culture—universally inclusive and pluralistic in rhetoric, selectively particularistic and monocultural in fact—within a self-designated democratic context from its inception set the stage and tone for major struggles by members of the excluded groups (and supported to differing degrees by members of the dominant culture group) to match U.S. practice with its rhetoric.*
Historically, U.S. schools—to include teachers, administrators, curricula and materials—have aided in the institutionalization of maintaining and transmitting this cultural fiction alive across generations, and continue to do even in the present. Call it the Reproduction of Naïveté. Internalized values and attitudes, of course, serve to prompt patterned actions on a mass level without question—in spite of moral or intellectual arguments, or empirical evidence, to the contrary. My next series of blog postings will provide further detail on this phenomenon and its effects.
* There are, of course, professional writers at major institutes—such as Thomas Sowell and Dinesh D’Souza, both at the Hoover Institute of War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University—who are non-white (Sowell is African American) or who could be perceived as non-white (D’Souza is Asian Indian), and who are fervently conservative and ardently anti-multicultural education. See, for example, Sowell’s columns at Citizens for a Constitutional Republic http://www.citizensforaconstitutionalrepublic.com/Thomas_Sowell.html, and D’Souza’s daily blog and writings at http://www.dineshdsouza.com/.
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