We the peoples: the multiculturalist agenda is shattering the American identity.

The multiculturalist agenda is shattering the American identity.

Most parents expect that their children will, in the course of their studies, learn the history of the American people. However, among leading educators, the idea that there is an "American people" is gradually, but nevertheless steadily, losing ground to the view that instead of one people the United States of America consists of many diverse "peoples."

The proposed National History Standards and comment on them provide a rich set of examples. The Council for Basic Education recently released a report that endorses as "solid guiding principles" the NHS's "Criteria for the Development of Standards." The Criteria state that a major goal of American-history teaching is to develop "mutual respect" among the "many peoples" of the United States. And the National History Standards themselves often substitute the phrase "the American peoples" for "the American people." For example, one of the core history standards suggests that students understand how "big business, heavy industry, and mechanized farming transformed the American peoples" in the late nineteenth century.

It is significant that the educators who wrote the National History Standards chose to use the term "peoples" instead of "ethnic groups." It is also significant that the educators and scholars who wrote the Council for Basic Education's report did not flinch from endorsing Criteria that refer to the "peoples" of the United States.

In the past several years the concept of "the American peoples" has gained currency among state educators. In July 1991, New York State released a new social-studies curriculum, "One Nation, Many Peoples: A Declaration of Cultural Interdependence." On June 9, 1995, New York's latest social-studies plan again referred to the American "peoples." In September 1995, the Colorado State Board of Education adopted history standards recommending that students describe the "interaction" of "various peoples" ("African, Asian, European, Latino, and Native American") living in the United States, as if these bureaucratic and often artificial classifications constituted separate "peoples."

Leaders of major educational organizations have also adopted this concept. The major expert on multiculturalism for the nation's largest civic education association, the National Council for the Social Studies, wrote in May 1994: "To create an authentic democratic unum with moral authority and perceived legitimacy, the pluribus (diverse peoples) must negotiate and share power." On March 31, 1995, in his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Professor Gary B. Nash (principal author of the National History Standards) repeatedly evoked the concept of America's "peoples."

Far from being trivial, this rhetorical shift from American people to American "peoples" is truly revolutionary: it implies a transformation of the American liberal democratic regime. In effect, leading educators are reinventing America from a nation of individuals, voluntary associations, and ethnic groups to a confederation of diverse "peoples" with separate world views and different "cultures." The shift from a multiethnic vision of America to a multicultural one is a fundamental change: from a nation based on individual citizenship, with those citizens belonging to racial and ethnic groups from all over the world, to a nation composed of different "peoples" who enter the public arena as groups instead of individuals.

In multiethnic America, many individuals continue certain ethnic traditions and habits, while affirming the core values of the American civic culture and our national heritage. In multicultural America, different peoples have their own cultures, values, world views, and ways of life. These "peoples" then "contest and negotiate for power" with little in common save "celebrating" the transcendent value of diversity itself.

The distinction between a multiethnic and a multicultural society becomes clear when we observe how educators define culture and multiculturalism. The Florida social-studies framework of August 1994 declares that "Culture suggests the ideas, customs, skills, arts, etc. of a people." The framework recommends that "Students recognize that people interact with their environments and create systems comprised of unique beliefs, values, traditions, languages, customs, technology, and institutions." It further states that Florida students should recognize the "different cultures present in the classroom" and "understand that cultures have different beliefs and values."

The language of multicultural education implies that the United States is a multinational (as opposed to a multiethnic) state like the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, or India. This is in direct opposition to the basic vision of America enshrined in the core documents of the nation. The Declaration of Independence refers to the necessity of "one People" to dissolve its political bonds with another, and our Constitution reads "We the People," not "we the peoples," of the United States.

Interestingly, we have had this argument before in our history. At the beginning of the twentieth century a group of American intellectuals, most prominently Horace Kallen, under the banner of "cultural pluralism" promoted the concept of America as a federation of separate "nations" or "peoples." During the first two decades of the twentieth century the cultural pluralists were defeated by other sectors of the American elite that favored civic assimilation and "Americanization." Today, at the end of the twentieth century, educational elites have accepted a new version of cultural pluralism called "multiculturalism" and "diversity."

Furthermore, undeterred either by election results or by popular opinion, the multicultural educators are in no mood to brook opposition to their plans. Thus, the latest New York social-studies curricular guide declares that "multicultural education needs to be more broadly defined and understood so that teachers from a wide range of disciplines can respond to it in appropriate ways and resistance to it can be minimized." Apparently, the advocacy of "multiple perspectives" repeated mantra-like throughout the state's curricular framework does not apply to multiculturalism and diversity.

The continued advance of the multicultural project and the diversity agenda over rising political opposition suggests that this culture war will persist for a long time to come. Unfortunately, it will most probably be a war of attrition in which victory will go to the side that is better organized and has the greater stamina, rather than the side that presents the more cogent arguments.

The long-term health of the nation's civic culture depends upon the core values, symbols, ideas, and concepts that are accepted as legitimate by cultural and educational leaders long before they appear in textbooks and lesson plans. Today's curriculum fights over multiculturalism and multiethnicity, over diversity and unity, will influence our vision of ourselves and shape the cultural health of the American people (or the American peoples?) well into the twenty-first century. At least for now, as the Council for Basic Education's report illustrates, the proposition that America is a nation of different "peoples" continues to advance. Related Article: As Others See Us?

1) "The American nation is a new social and international community . . . and the prototype of larger international communities of the future" (Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume 24, page 363).

2) "A new historic community of peoples -- the American people --has emerged under the impact of various powerful unifying factors" (EB, Volume 17, page 378).

3) "The American people constitute a multinational collective entity" (EB, Volume 24, page 363).

4) . . . "enabled the American people . . . to create a powerful multinational state that harmoniously blends the interest of the entire society with the interest of each ethnic group" (EB, Volume 17, 378).

5) "American borders lose their former significance and do not promote national exclusiveness" (EB, Volume 17, page 356).

6) "The increased international traits in the national culture and character do not mean that national traits are being sacrificed but that the very meaning of the term 'national' is changing and becoming more inclusive" (EB, Volume 24, page 363).

Actually, these quotes are not from the Encyclopedia Britannica, they're from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1974; English-language edition 1979 - 90). And they are not quite as they appear in the original. "Soviet" and "socialist" are replaced with "American," and "each nation and each people" with "each ethnic group," making them indistinguishable from the opinions of American multiculturalists.