Multiculturalism

Guenter E. Salter, Ph.D.

Much has been said and written about the contemporarily fashionable cultural phenomenon of multiculturalism and its philosophical and sociological implications. At this moment, it is still evolving, growing, expanding, enticing, ensnaring, and thoroughly befuddling. When and where it will end, no one knows; one can only speculate. Hundreds of books and articles have been written on this subject; and more are being published, not every year or every month but, so it seems, every day. I want to offer, therefore, from a Christian perspective, some information, some definitions, some thoughts and deliberations about this topic, since pastors and educators in particular with increasing frequency will be forced to face and deal with it.

At this time, it is not quite clear to me whether multiculturalism as we see it now is just a good idea gone bad or the natural unfolding and devolution of a carefully crafted master plan. I tend to adopt the latter as the correct perspective. At any rate, multiculturalism is now much more than a concept. It is a movement with a political agenda, pushed by the storm-troopers of the NEA and their cohorts to swell their ranks and shout the party line, not with logic and persuasion, but—as Hitler did—with demagoguery and coercion. All educational institutions, all educators are expected to welcome, participate in, and promote this trend. Those who do not are accused of being insensitive and wanting to "turn the clock back," as though progress were measured by the extent to which the relevance of the past is denied.

Of the two options offered above, let us first deal with the one that views multiculturalism as a good idea gone bad. There are several definitions for the concept of "culture." The most common, comprehensive, general definition—as it is to be understood and applied to our discussion-is this: "The totality of socially transmitted patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristic of a community or population." Note the applicability to community or population, not to individuals. We are all members of dozens of groups, some quite diverse, but we share the same culture as Americans. Here are some of the groups that I belong to: males, husbands, fathers, naturalized citizens, university administrators, military veterans, recovered cancer victims, ex-POWs, etc. My wife does not belong to any of these groups but to others from which I am excluded. There are some groups to which we belong jointly: We are Christians, church members, parents, grandparents, homeowners, married people, etc. However, all of us most assuredly share the same culture. We live in the United States of America; and we see ourselves as Americans. And when we travel overseas in Switzerland or in Italy or in Greece, we get quite excited when we meet other Americans there. I would not run to my wife and tell her, "Honey, I just met another father" or "another homeowner." No, it is the American culture that unites us, that makes us distinct. Thus we talk about European culture, Russian culture, or Arabian culture.

Now it is an undeniable fact that we as Americans suffer from extreme cultural myopia. We think that our way of life is the best, that the whole world should copy our political system, that our habits and customs are far superior to all others, and that everybody should learn English so that he can communicate with us. If people in Europe hold their knives and forks differently from the way we do it, they "eat funny"; when the Japanese bow repeatedly, we smile in amusement; we think the British are stuffed shirts because they do not exchange first names with us five minutes after we meet them; Germans lack a sense of humor because they do not like preachers to tell jokes in church; and when people do not understand our language, we speak louder and very slowly, because they obviously are either deaf or dumb. That describes rather accurately our reaction when we encounter non-American cultures. It is, therefore, an excellent and most desirable idea to make Americans culturally sensitive, to make them multicultural, as it were; that is to say, teach them that there exist other cultures besides the American culture, and that these deserve to be acknowledged or respected. To be sure, not all cultures are alike; some are inferior, some superior when measured against an absolute standard; some are developing, others are degenerating. Yet it is the mark of an educated, refined person to be at ease and conduct himself with propriety and assurance as he meets, communicates, and deals with people from different cultures. That has always been the goal of a liberal arts education. But notice how much we lack that as Americans. Every time the president goes abroad, be he Carter, Reagan, Bush, or Clinton, there is some gaffe, some mistranslation of a word or phrase, some unintended snub or act of boorishness occasioned by cultural deficiency.

Multiculturalism, then, is or should be an awareness that other cultures do exist, have a right to exist, and do not have to conform to ours to be acceptable. As such awareness grows and matures on an international basis, it should be practiced domestically too, especially in education. That is why at Bob Jones University we teach foreign languages: not only the words of a foreign tongue but also the history and culture of a people in order to promote understanding and appreciation. That is why we teach world literature or philosophy: to show that not everything worth knowing has been originally conceived or written in English. Since many students come to us from foreign countries, we can serve them much better as we become culturally sensitive, knowing perhaps that a young person who does not look us in the eye is not shy or dishonest, but has been taught in his culture that it is a sign of disrespect to do so with an older person. When a person from a different culture seems evasive in response to a direct question, it is not necessarily a sign of deceitfulness or indecision, but he might have been taught that it is rude to come directly to the point. Many other incidents of behavior might just be culturally motivated and must be understood in order to ensure fair treatment and evaluation of such a student.

Cultural awareness and sensitivity must go beyond ethnic diversity and include a realization that often a generation gap exists in terms of language usage. Proverbs, quotations, and metaphors so familiar to older people may be totally unknown to the younger generation. Students who have grown up with automobile and jet travel will not understand an exhortation to "get your tail up over the dashboard," when the only dashboard they know is to be found in a car. The affirmation that something is "as sound as a dollar" will carry no assurance of quality for a young person. When was the last time you heard of "Carter's little liver pills," or what does the threat to take someone "behind the woodshed" convey to today's generation? In fact, they may not even know what a woodshed is.

The above considerations indicate the salutary effect that multicultural awareness can and does have on educational and other communicative interplay. Now enter the big wrong turn. If we need or want to be culturally sensitive along ethnic or generational lines, perhaps we should be so also in terms of gender identification, physical attributes and capabilities, family income, sexual or religious orientation, disabilities of whatever nature-and thus we could divide ad infinitum and ad absurdum our general or student population into a myriad of numerically ever-decreasing specialty groups until any picture of cohesion is thoroughly shattered; and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put the multicultural Humpty-Dumpty together again. So, if we had arrived at the current state of multiculturalism via this route, it still would be deplorable, but perhaps understandable and forgivable: a good idea gone bad. But such is not the case.

Instead, multiculturalism is not about culture at all, but about the remaking of society. More and more we do not find the term "multiculturalism" by itself but rather we read about "multiculturalism and social Reconstructionism." Brameld, the father of Reconstructionism, stated in 1956 that Reconstructionism offers a critique of modern culture. He holds that magnificent as their services to society may have been in the past, the major institutions and the corresponding social, economic, and other practices that developed during the preceding centuries of the modern era are now incapable of dealing with contemporary social issues. The areas of concern to Brameld were war and economic depression. The area of concern to the multiculturalists is the elimination of oppression of one group of people by another. To do this, the oppressed groups have to be identified; and as Shakespeare said, "aye, there's the rub." By concentrating on special interests and single issues, we go from multiculturalism to microcultural differences, until all of society is thoroughly fragmented.

As we try to understand multiculturalism, we look for a common denominator, for a philosophical framework to give the whole movement a logical foundation and intellectual credibility. We look in vain. Instead of a coherent philosophy we find only scraps of ideologies. There is no historical model or meaningful relation to tradition. The great thinkers of the past are conspicuous by their absence. Assumptions are freely made without substantiation about what should and should not be done in education. The concepts of good and evil in their traditional meaning are discredited as unscientific. In their place a multiplicity of opinions is accepted, each opinion considered as valid as the next. Recommendations for the scrapping of established programs, policies, and procedures and their replacement by radically new approaches lack philosophical support and are introduced with vacuous phrases such as, "the authors believe," "it would be best if," "this should be done," etc. But we are never told why current educational procedures are evil-only that they are. Moral and cultural relativism is introduced, based on the wrong idea that since all human communities have equal access to greatness, then all cultures must be equal. They are not! Ignorance, disease, and squalor of some Third World cultures are obvious. Greek culture has given to the world monuments and architectural wonders and a body of thought upon which Western Civilization has built and developed its morality, politics, technology, economy, and arts. African culture has done none of these, nor has Nicaraguan or Aleut culture. Not all cultures are alike and capable of leading humanity to the limits of its collective capabilities.

The inability of making a convincing philosophical case is one of multiculturalism's greatest failures. It is by far not its only one; for its advocates can do no better in their attempt to establish a sensible program. In their effort to be all things to all people, the multiculturalists are very little to very few. To bring all of their concerns and attempts and suggestions and desires into a comprehensive and sensible program has a far lesser chance of success than the drafting of a reasoned communiqué by the inmates of an insane asylum. Let us start with two program recommendations and add other concerns and suggestions. In the textbook Multicultural Education in a Pluralistic Society, we read the following: "The authors believe that all teaching should be multicultural and all classrooms should be models of democracy and equity. To do this requires that educators

1. place the student at the center of the teaching and learning process;
2. promote human rights and respect for cultural differences;
3. believe that all students can learn;
4. acknowledge and build on the life histories and experiences of students' microcultural memberships;
5. critically analyze oppression and power relationships to understand racism, sexism, classism, and discrimination against the disabled, young, and aged;
6. critique society in the interest of social justice and equality;
7. participate in collective social action to ensure a democratic society.

One might make the following comments. (1) The student should always be the focus of the teaching/learning process. That is not a multiculturalist discovery. What would education be without the student! (2) Also, promoting human dignity and cultural awareness is at the heart of liberal arts education and cannot be arrogated by the multiculturalists as their special reserve. (3) Point number three is an article of faith that is not always supported by experiential reality. It prepares the way for "mainstreaming" which is the placement into one monolithic group and classroom of all students, regardless of intellectual ability, language comprehension, physical or other disabilities and teaching to their specific need. (4) Together with point three, this recommendation reveals one prominent goal of the multiculturalists which advocates elimination of all lines of demarcation and making the student feel good about himself-thereby giving him a sense of distorted reality-at the cost of good academic training. Certainly such teaching does not prepare a student to compete successfully in life; and the predicate has been laid for lifelong dependence upon some kind of government support. In a sporting event, we would not let athletes of vastly different abilities compete against each other. Why on earth would it then make sense to encourage disparate competition as we exchange the sports arena for the intellectual one? (5) Point five shows the intent of progressive fractionalization of society by dividing people into smaller and smaller groups, robbing them of a sense of cohesion and belonging. One might also inquire after the philosophical and intellectual competence as well as the political orientation of him who is to do the analyzing. Notice here the various -isms, which elsewhere are joined by ageism, handicapism, and others. (6) Point six is a corollary of the previous one and a fatuous endeavor without establishing first a rigorous philosophical basis. (7) Finally, collective social action needs identification and definition before the challenge of point number seven can be considered a meaningful statement, or else every multiculturalist may march to the beat of his own drummer, which pretty much describes the current situation.

For a more structured and prescriptive program, let us look at the one offered in Making Choices for Multicultural Education by Sleeter and Grant, published by Macmillan in 1994:

EDUCATION THAT IS MULTICULTURAL AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTIONIST

• Societal Goals: Promote social structural equality and cultural pluralism
• School goals: Prepare citizens to work actively toward social structural equality; promote cultural pluralism and alternative lifestyles; promote equal opportunity in the school
• Target Students: Everyone
• Curriculum: Organize content around current social issues involving racism, classism, sexism, handicapism; organize concepts around experiences and perspectives of several different American groups; use students' life experiences as starting point for analyzing oppression; teach critical thinking skills, analysis of alternative viewpoints; teach social action skills, empowerment skills
• Instruction: Involve students actively in democratic decision making; build on students' learning styles; adapt to students' skill levels; use cooperative learning
• Other aspects of classroom: Decorate room to reflect social action themes, cultural diversity, student interests; avoid testing and grouping procedures that designate some students as failures
• Support services: Help regular classroom adapt to as much diversity as possible
• Other school-wide concerns: Involve students in democratic decision making about substantive school-wide concerns; involve lower-class and minority parents actively in the school; involve school in local community action projects; make sure that staffing patterns include diverse racial, gender, and disability groups in nontraditional roles; use decorations, special events, school menus to reflect and include diverse groups; use library materials that portray diverse groups in diverse roles; make sure that extracurricular activities include all student groups and do not reinforce stereotypes; use discipline procedures that do not penalize any one group; make sure building is accessible to disabled people

You see here that diversity is uplifted as the summum bonum, the highest good; and that grouping students for instructional purposes is an absolute taboo. We are to remove all labeling and distinction and implement full integration, even of the learning disabled. (We may, however, keep the labels attached for the purpose of collecting federal funds for special education.) The argument is made that disabilities do not, as a general rule, impair a person's ability to perform. For example, an English teacher missing a left hand can teach English as well as one with two hands. Very true! But no allowance is made for a budding English teacher missing a left brain. The commitment to diversity extends to homosexuals to an ever-increasing degree. Officials at a prominent university in the eastern part of the United States have taken the position that diversity is not something you should tolerate; it is something you should promote! They have developed a strategic plan to recruit homosexuals and lesbians, offering incentives, such as insurance coverage to domestic partners. The multiculturalist is caught in a strange dilemma: in order to guarantee every person his perceived right and dignity, he has to create more and more groups to identify a heretofore oppressed or, at least, neglected group. Yet this microculturalization militates against the idea of mainstreaming, that is to say that all can be taught as a monolithic group, at the same time, in the same classroom, with the same results. In one school, a teacher was reprimanded for lining up boys and girls separately as they went to lunch. According to the reprimand, this reinforced the notion that boys and girls are distinct groups. One can only gasp in utter amazement that anyone would attempt to deny so obvious a fact. Furthermore, boys do behave differently from girls in a social setting. Yet it is not hard to see how this fits the agenda. If boys and girls are not distinct, then homosexuality expresses a perfectly normal relationship.

It is quite clear, according to these programs, that education is no longer concerned with academic training but with the remaking of society. The primary distinctions made by multiculturalism are RACE, CLASS, and GENDER. Race deals with culture differences; class deals with social and economic concerns; gender pushes the feminist agenda. From these primary distinctions derive groups divided by nationality, age, religion, sexual orientation and practices. Beyond that there are the disabled, the oppressed, the disempowered, and those who differ in language. No longer do we hear about correct and incorrect speech, but rather about dominant and non-dominant, standard and non-standard language or, more often now, dialect. We are not talking only about students whose native language might be Spanish or Vietnamese, but also about ghetto dialects that ought to be recognized as separate languages with the teacher being encouraged to teach part of his curriculum in that dialect. Rather than making it the highest priority for students to learn proper English in order that they will have an equal chance as they enter the world of business and other competition, bilingual education is advocated. But that only delays full functionality. Also, one could NOT mainstream for such instruction; for why should American-born students listen to instructions in, let us say, Vietnamese which, in turn, would discriminate against them in terms of understanding and progress? Let us go one natural step further. Bilingual education will not suffice if there are represented in the classroom fifteen different language backgrounds-a situation not at all unthinkable today. What does the teacher do? Give instructions in fifteen different languages?

If these trends go unchallenged and unchecked, where will they take us? If we have programs in ethnic, minority, and women's studies; programs in bilingual education; courses in cultural awareness, human relations, and values clarification; if our curriculum is laden with the concepts of racism, sexism, classism, ageism, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, powerlessness, power, inequality, equality, stereotyping-is there any room left to teach the traditional liberal arts and sciences that have built civilizations, created material sufficiency, challenged the mind, freed the spirit, and gladdened the soul? As we search the history of mankind, we find but two successful experiments of multiculturalism: one is the church, and the other is the United States of America. Why were these experiments successful, and why did they survive? They did because they built on a solid foundation and emerged victorious from the battles of ideas, not feelings. Faith, Freedom, and Citizenship are their pillars. Sacrifice of these ideals led to disunity, break-up, tribalization, and internecine warfare in all other experiments, as the lessons of the Hapsburg Empire, Lebanon, and Kosovo have taught-to name but a few. The United States is the most prosperous and freest nation on earth. Aside from God's abundant blessings, our rich Judeo-Christian heritage, passed on from generation to generation through our educational institutions, has made this country what it is. We are about to lose this for no other reason than that a spiritually blind and intellectually bankrupt power elite has turned to goals that are philosophically unsubstantiated and morally corrupt. We are a strong and proud nation, and we must teach that which has made us so: our common culture. That is our legacy; that is our future. In sports, I cannot pitch a field goal down the third baseline as I slam-dunk the shuttlecock on a penalty shot. If I mix the elements of all these various sports together, I invite chaos and teach nothing. Thus it goes in education.

Now, what is our response to all of this? As Christians, we have the tremendous advantage of going to the Scriptures for our answers and instructions. There is no better example than that of the Apostle Paul to teach us about the concept and application of multiculturalism. Did he advocate tribalism and multiculturalism? No! He said that to the Jew he was a Jew, a Greek to the Greek, weak to the weak, under the law to them that were under the law; and he concluded: "I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some" (I Cor. 9:22). That was his answer. And that should be ours.

Reprinted from Balance, a publication of the School of Education, Bob Jones University. Used with permission of Bob Jones University. Please write BJU Press, for permission to reproduce this article.