Will the new feeling of national unity in the aftermath of terrorist attacks set the stage for a turn away from multicultural education, which de-emphasizes the common American culture and teaches children to take pride in their own racial ethnic and national origins instead? In a short essay in the Brookings Review, Diane Ravitch describes how schools eschewed their traditional role of assimilating newcomers into the national melting pot and embraced multiculturalism in the 1960s and 1970s. She identifies some practical problems with teaching children to appreciate their racial and ethnic heritage in the public schools, including 1) it means that what is taught in school depends on who attends the school (and it's unclear what students in a mixed school will learn), and 2) public schools lose a sense of a distinctive American culture forged by people from different backgrounds. She concludes that neither assimilationism or multiculturalism is sufficient, and urges schools to avoid dividing children along racial and ethnic lines and instead give all children access to the best of America's heritage while honoring the strong and positive values that immigrants bring to America. "Diversity, Tragedy, and the Schools," by Diane Ravitch, Brookings Review, Winter 2002.
