Weblog VII: Education in a Multicultural Society: Our Future’s Greatest Challenge

After reading “Education in a Multicultural Society: Our Future’s Greatest Challenge,” I decided that a good way to organize my thoughts would be to highlight and comment on some of the quotes made throughout the article.

“The question is not necessarily how to create the perfect ‘culturally matched’ learning situation for each ethnic group, but rather how to recognize when there is a problem for a particular child and how to seek its cause in the most broadly conceived fashion.”
I think that this is one of the most important ideas in multicultural education. We raise children in such a way that stays with them throughout their lives and impacts the future generations. It is a continuous cycle, and if we as a society raise children to accept individual differences and focus on each individual child when there is a situation that needs to be addressed, soon our future generations will learn how to better deal with different cultures and characteristics then we have.

“When a significant difference exists between the students’ culture and the school’s culture, teachers can easily misread students’ aptitudes, intents, or abilities as a result of the differences in styles of language use and interactional patterns.”
This is an important point that all teachers need to address in their classrooms. Cultural differences may affect a student’s behavior and teachers often read that as inappropriate when in fact it is simply how the student is raised. One of the best ways to deal with this situation is taking a step back and considering the student’s behavior before judging or punishing them.

“Even with well-intentioned educators, not only our children’s legacies but our children themselves can become invisible.”
This paragraph really made a great point, especially bringing in the book White Teacher, which I read last semester. Some teachers think that they should completely ignore cultural and racial differences and that will make them go away, but all it does is hide the problem. Every culture is beautiful in its own way and they should all be recognized and appreciated instead of overlooked. This sends the same message to the children that their culture may still be good or bad because it is or is not acknowledged.