Multiculturalism and Mélange
Files
Description
In order to think clearly about multicultural education, we need to think what it is for a person to grow up and form an identity in a culturally plural society. Official prescriptions for the study of history and social studies give a lot of attention to the multiplicity of cultures in the United States; but they say much less about what that diversity implies for the identities of particular individuals. This is a pity because questions about community and identity are complex and illuminating, and the array of possible answers poses an interesting challenge to our preconceptions about the role of culture in individual lives. Does cultural plurality at the social level imply cultural plurality in the constitution and identity of each individual member of the society? Or does it rather presuppose cultural homogeneity at the individual level, so that even though the society emerges as a patchwork, each constituent person or group is cut from whole cloth? If “[t]he United States is a microcosm of humanity today,” does that make each citizen also a microcosm, so that she reflects in her relationships, aspirations, and experiences a little of each of the country's constitutive cultures? Or is the United States a microcosm in which the integrity of each person's identity is secured by the culture and ethnicity of some group in particular? The questions are not just about the existing characteristics of a multicultural society; they are also about what a society of this kind should aspire to. The aim, we are told, is to reconcile national unity with respect for difference: e pluribus unum. Does the hope for this unity-in-diversity lie in the synthesis that each individual forges among the various cultural experiences and encounters that make up her life? Or is it to be purely a social and political synthesis, welded externally among culturally disparate individuals and groups? If the latter, how is the social synthesis to be sustained? How, for example, can it be rooted in the consciousness of the various persons that make up the society in question without at the same time undermining and compromising the integrity of the particular cultures and ethnicities that secure each person's identity? How, as a matter of identity, can one belong to one culture in particular and still be a good citizen of a multicultural society?
Source Publication
Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique
Source Editors/Authors
Robert K. Fullinwider
Publication Date
1996
Recommended Citation
Waldron, Jeremy, "Multiculturalism and Mélange" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 1644.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1644
