Community Relations and Multicultural Education in Australia

Abstract

effective legitimation of those societies necessitated the ideological orientation inherent within such strategies if the commitment to democratisation, awakened and tempered in the heat of war, was to be put into effect. The common school or comprehensive school was seen in those days as a kind of panacea for societies' ills which would herald the dawn of a new age of social, economic and educational harmony and equity. Gradually, as new strategies were tried and found wanting, equality was sought in the pursuit of compensatory education and in additional reforms such as of internal school restructuring, curriculum renewal and development. With these developments the pursuit of educational equality had passed irrevocably from its structural into a cultural phase and a panoply of new organisations and writings emerged, committed to 'a cultural perspective on the curriculum'. The hidden and parallel curricula were discovered and gradually a reappraisal began of the cultural capital available as a baseline for the selection of valued knowledge called curriculum. Parallel to this latter development, old monist orthodoxies began to be challenged by the presence in Western European societies such as Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom, of increasingly diverse cultural backgrounds and presuppositions. In 'older' countries of mass immigration such as the United States, Canada and Australia 'melting pots' were discarded and national policies of multiculturalism espoused [1]. The balancing act involved in the implementation of educational policies attuned to multicultural societies has been described as The Pluralist Dilemma [2] by Bullivant and certainly education to preserve and foster cultural diversity, on the one hand, and to maintain the national cohesion of the polity, on the other, has presented western democracies with massive legitimation problems: and nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in Australia. With a small population of just over 14 million concentrated in a few urban areas, over 40% of its population of migrant background (internationally second only to Israel in this respect) and over a hundred language groups, Australia is par excellence a multicultural society. Economic difficulties and the arrival of large numbers of Indo-Chinese refugees appear to have accentuated the problem and sharpened the need for multicultural education, for such phenomena have turned back the cloak under which racialist attitudes were slumbering and brought back echoes of the former 'White Australia Policy'. True, this policy has long since been discarded by all responsible political parties and all are now firmly--even enthusiastical