Against the Multicultural Agenda. A Critical Thinking Alternative.

Overview & Synopsis

It is suggested that the implementation of multicultural education and multiculturalism would have profound sociopolitical consequences. This work demonstrates significant inadequacies in the social science and philosophical foundations of multicultural education and multiculturalism, such as their use of certain anthropologists' conceptions of separate races and single cultures and their affiliations with realist and postmodernist currents in philosophy. The book introduces education reform proposals grounded in critical thinking principles. Chapter 1, "Multicultural Education: Development, Variants, and Controversies," presents the development of multicultural education, its various definitions, and disputes among its proponents and opponents. Advocacy of multicultural education is grounded in unclear and arbitrary racial and ethnic distributions. Chapter 2, "Multiculturalism: Egalitarian Social Reconstruction through Education Reform," outlines the growth of multicultural education to demands for equal representations of cultures. Chapter 3, "Multiculturalism: An Assessment of Its Analytical Foundations," examines key arguments in various multiculturalist schools, and Chapter 4, "Education Reform, Multiculturalism, and Critical Thinking," is organized around an education model, an educability model, and the incompatibility of multicultural education and critical thinking. (SLD)