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The Dangers of a Multicultural Curriculum
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19902 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1992 |
1,918 Words |
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Albert Shanker
Albert Shanker is president of the American Federation of
Teachers. |
We're in the midst of an important change in our school curriculum. By including the contributions of many different groups that have not previously been recognized, we're trying to make a multicultural curriculum that accurately reflects our society.
However, some groups, including the New York State Board of Regents, which has just accepted guidelines for a new social studies curriculum, may end up sacrificing accuracy for diversity. They seem to think that, in order to give kids varied points of view, it is perfectly acceptable to teach ideas and the ories that few or no reputable scholars accept. The Regents' proposal calls this using " non-canonical knowledge and techniques" and "nondominant knowledge sources."
You can see some good examples of what's wrong with this idea in the Portland (Oregon) "African-American Baseline Essays." This minicurriculum, made up of essays on social studies, science, language arts, mathematics, art and music, has been adopted by school systems all over the country and used as a model by many others.
The Portland essays present ancient Egypt as an African culture that strongly influenced the development of European civilization and this is fair enough. It's a view with which most reputable scholars have agreed for 40 years, and it corrects distortions of previous historians who where inclined to ignore Egypt's contribution or to disregard the fact that Egypt was an African civilization. But the baseline essays go far beyond discussion Egypt as an African society; they assert a number of ideas that are inconsistent with the best scholarship. For instance, they maintain that the inhabitants of ancient Egypt were black Africans.
Teaching Wrong Lessons
Scholars of Egyptian history and archaeology say that the evidence suggests an entirely different story. Far from being all black (or all white), ancient Egypt, they say, was a multiracial society with a variety of racial types much like that of modern Egypt. In any case, our concept of race--a relatively modern invention would not have made much sense to ancient Egyptians, who did not look at people in terms of skin color or hair texture. So the base-line essays not only misrepresent the evidence by insisting that Egypt was a black African society, they also distort the example that Egypt has to offer our own multiracial society in order to make a political point.
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