Multicultural Illiteracy.

Schools' treatment of diversity places students into categories and applies ineffectual learning methods to these stereotypes

The meaning of the word "diversity" has been badly abused in recent decades. American educators have long honored diversity in the only educationally meaningful sense of the word--individual difference.

For generations teachers were trained to look at students as individuals. Each student was supposedly endowed with a different combination of talents, abilities, interests and opinions. There is no question that this way of understanding diversity created strong positive educational outcomes and could continue to do so. Intellectual or social conformity has never been an American trait.

But in an Orwellian transformation of the meaning of the word, diversity has come to mean looking at a student as a representative of a particular demographic category. It now conveys the erroneous notion that, for example, all girls think and learn in one way, all boys in another or that all black students think and learn in one way, all Asians in another, all white students in yet another. To see students as members of a particular racial category or "culture" (to use current educational jargon), rather than as unique individuals, makes all the difference in the world,

Few positive outcomes are possible in an educational system that slots all students into spurious racial categories and then attaches fictitious ways of thinking, learning and knowing to each. The result is not the elimination of stereotypes but the freezing of them.

Classified by Category

We always have had different races and ethnic groups in our schools, although not in the same numbers or kinds in all schools. I grew up in a small Massachusetts town in which the children or grandchildren of early 20th century immigrants were as numerous as the children of those whose families had lived in the town for several hundred years.

As children, we all knew each others' backgrounds. We knew who spoke Italian, Armenian, Greek, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Polish or French Canadian in their home. We knew which families attended the local Catholic church, one of the many Protestant churches in town or the synagogue in a neighboring city. But not one of my teachers, in my presence, ever denigrated our ethnic, linguistic or religious backgrounds. Indeed, what they emphasized was something all our parents wanted them to stress. All of us, we were told repeatedly, were American citizens. And we were individual American citizens, not Lithuanian Americans, Irish Americans and so on, even though our parents may have belonged to the local Lithuanian, Polish or Italian social club or read an Armenian or Polish newspaper. We were not classified into racial or ethnic categories for any purpose.

Yes, there was prejudice in America. Why should this country be different from the others? But we all knew from our families there was even more prejudice elsewhere in the world, especially in those countries from which our families had come. Furthermore, the prejudice here was not just in those families who had been here for generations, it was also in the newcomers.

Every group had its own prejudices toward outsiders, as we all learned through experience, and it didn't bother us much. It was just another one of life's many hurdles to surmount. What was more important was that we all lived under the same set of laws as American citizens. These were ideals, to be sure, not always realities, but they were official ideals with teeth behind them, and we learned that they could be appealed to or drawn on, as women found in the early part of the century in gaining the right to vote, or as court decisions and civil rights legislation showed us in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fortunately for us, our teachers didn't subject us to endless lessons on tolerance and on how to be respectful of each other's "culture." They simply modeled tolerance for us and dealt, briefly, with problematic incidents whenever they arose in school. We were thus able to spend most of our school time on academic matters. Our main responsibility was to go to school every day, to be respectful of our teachers and to do our homework.

It's true we didn't see our home cultures in what we read in school, but we identified with each other as American citizens, something we and our parents were proud to be, despite our country s flaws. We probably would have welcomed attempts at a realistic curriculum that included more information or literature on the many immigrant groups in this country, as well as on the African Americans and Native Americans, but only if it did not end up making it more difficult for us to learn how to read and write English or giving us a warped or dishonest view of our own country and the larger world within which we live.

Negative Connotations

It is highly ironic that multiculturalism has evolved as an educational philosophy from its original and positive meaning of inclusion to mean something very negative, especially for us. This was one of the major findings of my research on the contents of all the grade 4 and grade 6 readers in six leading basal reading series, published between 1993 and 1995, as reported in Losing Our Language.

Rather than broadening students' horizons about the ethnic diversity of this country, today's version of multiculturalism has led to the suppression of the stories of most immigrant groups to this country. Overall, the selections in these readers convey the picture of an almost monolithic white world, with none of the real ethnic diversity that can be seen in just the listing of restaurants in a telephone directory for any city in this country. Almost all of the various European ethnic groups I grew up with have been excluded. Instead of the real America, we find a highly shrunken mainstream culture in most series, surrounded by Native Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans and Hispanics, none of whom seem to interact much with each other.

Nor do today's readers give children an informed understanding of the real world within which they live. Nowhere do children read about the first airplane flight, the first transatlantic flight, the first exploration of space, the discovery of penicillin or the polio vaccine or how such inventions as the light bulb, radio, telegraph, steamboat, telephone, sewing machine, phonograph or radar came about. Apparently, accounts of these significant discoveries or inventions have been banished from students' common knowledge because most portray the accomplishments of white males.

But without the stories about the pioneers in science and technology (a few of whom were females, like Marie Curie), both boys and girls are unlikely to acquire a historically accurate timeframe for sequencing the major discoveries that have shaped their life today. The greater loss is that of an educational role model. The current substitutes for these stories in the readers--stories about people who have overcome racism or sexism or physical disabilities--are unlikely to give children insights into the power of intellectual curiosity in sustaining perseverance or the role of intellectual gratitication in rewarding this perseverance.

Wayward Literacy

The most visible problem I found in the readers is at the level of language itself. The kinds of selections now featured in the readers make it almost impossible for children to develop a rich, literate vocabulary in English over the grades. In some series, children must learn a dazzling array of proper nouns, words for the mundane features of daily life, words for ethnic foods in countries around the world and other non-English words, most of which contribute little if anything to the development of their competence in the English language.

For example, consider this paragraph near the end of a story in a grade 4 reader: "In the wee hours of the morning, the family made a circle around Grandma Ida, Beth and Chris. Grandma Ida gave the In this new year let us continue to practice umoja, kujichagulia, ujima, ujamaa, nia, kuumba and imani. Let us strive to do something that will last as long as the earth turns and water flows.'"

Or consider this sentence in another grade 4 reader: "The whole family sat under wide trees and ate arroz con gandules, pernil, viandas and tostones, ensalada de chayotes y tomates and pasteles."

Or these sentences in a grade 6 reader: "On the engawa after dinner, Mr. Ono said to Mitsuo, 'Take Lincoln to the dojo. You are not too tired, are you, Lincoln-kun?'"

Not only are children in this country unlikely to see any of these Swahili, Spanish or Japanese words in any of their textbooks in science, mathematics or history, they are unlikely to see them in any other piece of literature as well. They have wasted their intellectual energy not only learning their meaning but also learning how to pronounce them. It is not clear why these academically useless words, some of which are italicized, some not, are judged to be of importance by contemporary teacher educators.

These educators also seem to think that children should spend a considerable amount of class time engaged in conversations with each other about each other's ethnic cultures and daily lives--in the name of building self-esteem and group identity. But using precious class time for frequent conversations about intellectually barren topics that draw on intellectually limited vocabularies deprives the very students who most need it of opportunities to practice using the lexical building blocks necessary for conceptual growth and analytical thinking.

The present version of multiculturalism may well be largely responsible, through its effects on classroom materials and instruction, for the growing gap between the scores of minority students and other students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress examinations in reading. We need public discussions of the goals that should dominate reading instruction. Do we want teachers absorbed with the development of their children's egos, intent on shaping their feelings about themselves and others in specific ways? Or do we want teachers to concentrate on developing their children's minds, helping them acquire the knowledge, vocabulary and analytical skills that enable them to think for themselves and to choose the kind of personal identity they find most meaningful?

Sandra Stotsky is a research associate with the Philosophy of Education Research Center at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.