Mulitcultralism and how it affects education Essay

Mulitcultralism and how it affects education - Essay Example Culture shapes human behavior, attitudes, and values. Human behavior results from a process of socialization, and socialization always takes place within the context of specific cultural and ethnic environments. A person's humanity cannot be isolated or divorced from his or her culture or ethnicity. One cannot be human without culture and ethnicity, and one cannot have culture and ethnicity without being human. Now multiculturism becomes the focus point for educators and policy makers to be included and becomes necessity to include it in their planning process itself. In the shrinking world where different nationalities interacting with each other on the regular basis and people are moving freely within the world, education become the central point of interaction between them. People are moving outside world for education only. So people having different language, set of ethos and social value to attitude as well as behavior interacts with each other simply affects the education. Eac h & every Govt. and Educators have to take care of these change and multiculturism phenomenon and understanding has to be included in the curriculum itself. Now multiculturism becomes part of the education system as a whole and a whole lot of theories of multicultural education is being shown us the further path for educational development and research. Schools are microcosms of mainstream society (LaBelle, 1976). In their procedural norms, codes of behavior, structural arrangements, and distribution of power, privilege, and responsibility, they mirror Anglo centric cultural values. Just as classroom teachers, school administrators, and policymakers carry their cultural experiences and perspectives into their educational decisions and actions, students from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds do likewise in their learning attitudes and behaviors (Gay, 1994). Teaching about cultural pluralism is the most traditional and common approach. It is primarily content centered, with an emphasis on developing units of instruction (lessons, modules, courses) about the history, heritage, contributions, and social issues of ethnic groups. These units may be designed to be included in any school subject, but most often appear in social studies, language arts, and fine arts. Another manifestation of this approach is analyzing textbooks and other instructional materials for their treatment of people of color and revising them when necessary to increase their accuracy and overall representation of cultural diversity. Multicultural education means different things to different people. Multicultural education relates to education and instruction designed for the cultures of several different races man education system. This approach to teaching and learning is based upon consensus building, respect and fostering cultural pluralism within racial societies. Multicultural education acknowledges and incorporates positive racial idiosyncrasies into classroom atmospheres (Tisdell, 1995). Multiculturism affects specifically the learning environment. A particular classroom, including the instructor or facilitator and the learners in a specific learning situation, constitutes the learning environment in this sense. Of course the specific learning environm