Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Education Essay Example For Students

Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Education Essay Let me begin this essay by stating that I am a retired English teacher of 34 years experience and believe that I have treated all of my students fairly and equitably. Three times I had been named into Whos Who Among American Teachers and two of those nominations have been by minority students, one black and one Hispanic. Those students realized that my classroom standards were just as tough on them as they were on the majority Caucasian students and that I gave them no favoritism, slack or handicap for their minority-status ethnicity. I had always refused to dumb down my curriculum Grammar, Vocabulary, Literature, Writing Skills to accommodate students that lacked motivation, desire, curiosity, cooperation, respect for teacher authority and a willingness to learn. A year before I retired in 1999 my Middle Schools English Department had a special curriculum meeting and the Administration and my Department Supervisor wanted to change and modernize the English curriculums literature textbooks. The choice eventually narrowed down to two distinct textbook series grades six-to-eight and my schools nine English teachers voted on which companys series to incorporate into the schools English curriculum. Obviously administrative fiat and pressure and trends from the State Department of Education was more important than teacher democratic input and the English Departments overwhelmingly selected first choice was abruptly discarded because the other more politically correct literature textbook series from the administratively preferred company happened to have more cultural diversity and subsequently was more multicultural. For thirty-four years I had loved teaching imaginative literature featuring such accomplished authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Alexander Dumas, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, Washington Irving, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, S. E. Hinton, George Eliot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, O. Henry and James Thurber. Apparently the fact that all of the aforementioned authors were white was a major problem because most of them had been effectively excluded in the newly acquired literature texts. The old literature texts and program were too white-oriented and were not consistent with New Jersey and USA politically correct trends in multicultural education. The new eighth grade literature textbook featured on its cover a painting of Sam Adoqueis Portrait of Rockney C. A statement inside the text indicated that Sam Adoquei was born in the West African country of Ghana and that Adoquei was a contemporary artist that loved painting landscapes. Old textbooks might have featured on their covers works by Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh or Leonardo DaVinci but in this day and age those great contributing artists to Western Civilization have been demoted in public schools in deference to people like Sam Adoquei of Ghana, West Africa. I must admit that the new eighth grade administratively selected and faculty overruled literature eighth grade textbook did have a token representation of established white authors. However the bulk of the contributors had names like Gloria Gonzalez Cuban American, Luci Tapahonso Navajo Indian, Yoshiko Uchida Oriental American, Gwendolyn Brooks Black American, Gary Soto son of California migrant workers, William Saroyan Armenian American, Maya Angelou Black American, Diane Mei Lin Mark Hawaiian American, Julio Noboa Polanco bilingual poet, Judith Ortiz Cofer Puerto Rican, Langston Hughes Black American, Julia Alvarez Hispanic, Ophelia Rivas Mexican, Nereida Roman Hispanic, Rudolfo A. Anaya Mexican American, Esmerela Santiago Puerto Rican, Wing Tex Lum Chinese poet, Naomi Shihab Nye Palestinian, Ved Mehta from India, Paul Yee American Chinese and Li-Young Lee Chinese. There is no doubt in my mind that multicultural education is dumbing down American public schools. Most of the obscure authors being presented to American students in the name of cultural diversity have produced works that have weak vocabulary, shallow plots, lackluster characters, non-intellectual subject matter and demonstrably unsophisticated writing skills. Yet these minority writers I wouldnt call all of them authors are presented to naÃÆ'Â ¯ve and impressionable eighth graders as valuable contributors to literature when their works pale in comparison to those of great authors that are presently being systematically removed from literature textbooks and gradually being replaced by in most cases obscure minority authors. The same type of phenomenon is happening in middle and high school History classes as is happening in Literature courses. When Martin Luther King Day was established as a National Holiday celebrated in January George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had to be diminished in stature to accommodate MLK on the school calendar. The traditional Washingtons Birthday and Lincolns Birthday were shrewdly consolidated into Presidents Day with Washington and Lincolns regular February birthdays being abandoned to allow room for Martin Luther King Day in January on the school calendar. And now February which used to almost exclusively belong to Washington and Lincoln is now declared Black American Month in schools across the country. XDSL Technology EssayThis is why Academic Education must become a privilege and not a right in American public middle and high schools. A parent of a disruptive non-motivated minority student once accused me of discrimination against her son during a parent/teacher conference. I shocked the hostile mother when I told her, I do indeed discriminate. I discriminate between lazy sassy students and respectful ambitious academic students. I am prejudiced against insolent students that answer back with disrespectful remarks, Im prejudiced against lazy students that dont do homework and class work and I do discriminate against insubordinate students that prevent me from teaching a class because of their incessant belligerence! I answered. If good didnt discriminate against evil, I continued, then there would be no distinction between good and evil. Both extremes would always appear to be the same thing. Sometimes discrimination is both necessary and good. In the final analysis, teachers should only be required to teach academics to academically oriented students in academic middle and high schools. Students that exhibit disruptive deportment, students that dont do homework and/or class work and students that prefer working with their hands rather than dealing with academic abstractions should attend Middle General Schools and Vocational High Schools where they could rightfully enjoy their unalienable right to an educat ion. If they want to transfer to an academic middle or high school then those individuals must demonstrate the initiative to earn the privilege of an academic education. But as I have explained Multicultural Education is often the antithesis to a bona fide academic education. When I had attended Catholic schools back in the fifties, the nuns taught me how to read, write, how to memorize and how to do basic arithmetic. I had only learned how to write personal and formal letters in elementary school and I didnt actually write a formal essay or fictional story in an English class until my junior year in high school. I was not falsely praised by my teachers for doing mediocre work as is the case in American public schools that are teeming with Multicultural education and with bored non-academic students expected by the State to do academic work. But the nuns did teach me the value of self-discipline and of perseverance, which ultimately proved to be invaluable in my future life. Educational Psychology demands that each student today must be praised and commended for doing even the most mediocre and lackluster work, and when a composition or story is done in fifth grade, the teacher must flatter each student as if he or she is a budding Shakespeare, Cervantes or the next T. S. Eliot. Despite the fact that I had only been exposed to grammar, punctuation and spelling skills in elementary school and had never written a creative story until the eleventh grade, I am happy to report that I have over two million words in print represented in twenty-four published books. And I have achieved all of that production despite lacking a Multicultural Education. And so today the academically oriented students being held hostage across the USA to Multicultural Education in American History and Literature classrooms will eventually ascend above their present unfavorable captivity and then realize their true potentials when they manage to evolve out of high school and filter into the real competitive economic world. Until then those academically oriented students minority children included are doomed being exposed to and suffering through educational and multicultural mediocrity. And finally, Multicultural education should not be eliminated from the curriculum but it should be diminished in influence to allow for a more accurate perspective of Literature and History to be presented to American school children. Crispus Attucks and Harriet Tubman should not supplant George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in February as equals sharing common historical prominence. And theres no way that Sam Adoquei is in the same league as Picasso or that Gloria Gonzalez and Yoshiko Uchida are the literary equivalents of Mark Twain and O. Henry. Our great American culture is being distorted and perverted enough by MTV, VH-I and by the Comedy Channel without ineffective social engineering and Multicultural Education polluting our American public school students and also our public schools already ambivalent academic standards. And it was principally because of that politically correct and multicultural new literature textbook series that had been administratively imposed on my middle schools English Department that convinced me it would be expedient for John Wiessner to retire from the teaching profession after thirty-four years of dedicated classroom instruction.