What Is Multicultural Education Today, Essay Example

What is multicultural education today? Do you believe it is important to implement a multicultural curriculum? Why/Why not! What are some of the goals for a multicultural education? Provide some examples for pros/cons for a multicultural education.

Essentially, multicultural education is an emerging discipline, which predominantly focuses on the creation of equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. One of the major goals of multicultural education is to facilitate students acquiring the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are necessary for sufficient development in pluralistic democratic society, as well as efficient communication, interaction, and negotiation with individuals from diverse groups. Thus, it aims for creation of a civic and moral community that will incorporate the idea of common good. I think multicultural curriculum is highly important to be implemented, for it can provide a sense of empowerment to students of the minority culture. Moreover, when students are taught about other cultures they obtain the insight into more important global issues that entail cooperative problem solving among individuals from diverse groups. Students will be able to comprehend other cultures as much as possible and compare the new information to former knowledge of their own cultural identifies and practices to generate new, different knowledge. On the other hand, some of the drawbacks of multicultural education are that it can create a false understanding of another culture, and the discussion of certain cultural issue may be painful for certain students.