A New Focus for Multicultural Education

Abstract

The adoption and teaching of multicultural education appears not to have transformed society's responses to difference in any obvious way. Consequently, it is proposed that multicultural education, as it is currently practiced, which focuses on teaching about other cultures, be refocused in favor of moral education, which will provide participants with a set of moral principles they can refer to when confronted by difference. To arrive at this proposal, a context is constructed, in which the disputatious nature of the concept, culture, is presented. This shows its controversial nature, yet it is used as an unproblematised point of departure in multicultural education. Social constructions of culture are then discussed and these are shown to be caricatures of what culture really is; yet these caricatures are often communicated as being representative of people's cultures. Finally, it is contended that the political dimension of multicultural education is not confronted; yet this dimension is crucial to our understanding of the asymmetrical relations of power that continue to characterize multicultural societies, and this is perpetuated by unchallenged assumptions that are made in the teaching of multicultural education.