Abstract
Common schooling and multicultural education intuitively seem to be mutually reinforcing and possibly even mutually necessary: each is motivated by and/or serves the aims of promoting social justice and equality, common civic membership, and mutual respect and understanding, among other goals. An examination of the practical relationship between the two, however, reveals that neither one is a necessary or sufficient condition for achieving the other; in fact, each may in fairly common circumstances make the other harder to achieve. In other words, there is no direct instrumental relationship between multicultural education and common schools. Nor is there a clear expressive relationship between the two. Although common schools may serve as explicit, public symbols of our multicultural civic commitment to diversity, mutual respect and egalitarian inclusiveness, many demographically common schools neglect or even betray multicultural ideals, while many restricted entry and even segregated schools may express these ideals better than most comprehensive and integrated schools. Hence, while multicultural education and common schooling do intuitively stand for similar, mutually reinforcing ideals, in practice they may be linked more closely in the confusions and dilemmas of implementation they both raise than in their mutual realisation.
Highlights
Common schooling and multicultural education intuitively seem to be mutually reinforcing, and possibly even mutually necessary: each is motivated by and/or serves the aims of promoting social justice and equality, common civic membership, and mutual respect and understanding, among other goals
How better to achieve the aims of multicultural education than to ensure that students are educated in schools that welcome, respect, and enable the academic success of students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds? How better to achieve the aims of common schools than to ensure that their curriculum, pedagogies, school culture, and practices are multicultural? It is hard to imagine how common schooling, done well, and multicultural education, done well, could be anything but mutually beneficial, even possibly mutually necessary
I start by querying the instrumental versus expressive relationship between the two, asking in section I if common schools are instrumental for realizing the aims of multicultural education, and the reverse in section II: is multicultural education instrumental for realizing the aims of common schooling? I demonstrate that each is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for achieving the other, and that each may in certain fairly common circumstances make the other harder to achieve
Summary
Common schooling and multicultural education intuitively seem to be mutually reinforcing, and possibly even mutually necessary: each is motivated by and/or serves the aims of promoting social justice and equality, common civic membership, and mutual respect and understanding, among other goals. Promoting inclusiveness and equality, reaching across difference, fostering mutual toleration and respect, enabling all students to achieve their highest potential, preparing citizens for a diverse society, creating a better worldโthese are all frequently appealed to as justifications for both common schooling and multicultural education.
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