The Recurring Dream: Symbolism and Ideology in Intercultural and Multicultural Education

Abstract

This article argues that American multicultural education as practiced in the 1970s and 1980s is, despite its rhetorical affirmation of pluralism, ideologically and symbolically akin to intercultural education as practiced in the 1940s, when pluralism did not enjoy avowed assent. If pluralism is to have a meaning distinct from mere diversity, it must recognize, in some serious manner, the identities and claims of groups as groups. Multicultural education, instead, is largely constructed around the concept of "individual differences," advances an apolitical and fragmented model of culture, and presumes an attitudinal explanation for ethnic conflict. That a movement rooted in protest and conflict that does include theorists of novel models of pluralism may be validly likened to an earlier movement of very different origins and context suggests the power of constraints and mediating mechanisms that determine curricular and pedagogical form and also suggests that the tolerable and attainable limits of pluralism in American public education remain narrow.

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