Multiculturalism policies in education only yield more division

Multiculturalism policies in education only yield more division

Introduction

In the United Kingdom, the concept of multicultural education was developed as a pragmatic response to the coming of the immigrants’ children from former colonial nations. The initial objective was to assimilate the minority and migrant children with no concessions to values possessed by these groups. There has been the recognition of the cultural, linguistic, and religious pluralism as well as the passing of the legislation to curb racial discrimination. In this particular essay, I will be focusing on the multicultural education of migrant children in England between the years 2010 to 2020.  According to (Payne and Welsh, 2000), the aspect of multiculturalism often entails a set of related cultural trends and movements that emphasizes the diversity of society and culture. Through the formulation of the theoretical framework based on the melting pot model, I will be able to discuss the extent to which multicultural education policies have divisions. To achieve this objective, I will conduct both empirical and theoretical literature review to extract the findings from other studies about the study topic. First and foremost, I will give definitions of multiculturalism, interculturalism, and link these aspects to the notions of inclusion, discrimination, and inclusion. Secondly, I will elaborate on both the ethnic and civic understanding of multiculturalism. Lastly, I will examine the aspect of multicultural education in light of migrants in England.

This particular essay matters a lot to educators, education policymakers, the government, and the migrant students because the classroom is increasingly becoming multicultural and, therefore, a need to have a proper understanding of the new challenges that come with such dynamics. The findings of this particular research seek to bridge the gap between academia and the real world through demonstrating alternative strategies to multicultural education that can be adopted to ensure equity in the provision of education both to the natives and immigrant children in England.

Multicultural education in England

Entire Europe has been experiencing a dramatic rise in the number of immigrants, and the demands placed on the education systems by the newcomer learners have skyrocketed. England, in particular, is struggling to address diverse academic, socioemotional, and linguistic demands for newly arrived young immigrants that have often encountered significant trauma and disruption. A bigger fraction of the newcomers that need extensive educational support and other social systems are the refugees who stream in the country and the unaccompanied minors who come in as adolescents? According to Eurostat, the 28 member states of the European Union, a total number of 750,220 asylum applications were received in 2015, out of which 61,730 are aged between 14 and 17 while 138,665 are below the age of 14 (Rutter, 2006). The ripple effect of this influx of people is felt in all countries within the United Kingdom. As a consequence of these, England is faced with insurmountable challenges in migrant education, including training its educators to adopt multicultural or intercultural approaches, among others.

Issues facing Black minorities in England

The minority pupils in England experience myriad issues that hamper their education. There are polarized achievement levels for this group of learners. According to Tomlin and Olusola, (2007), the Pakistanis, Caribbean, and Bangladeshis show larger percentages of school leavers without any qualification. In addition, these groups and other minority ethnic groups often encounter disproportionate exclusions and disciplining from schools. The achievement levels of minority pupils, therefore, exhibit the polarized pattern. Also, the aspect of hybrid and brutishness is prevalent in England. In particular, there is a social, sexual, generational, and cultural mix that is likely to have a significant impact on the minority community idea. The black community, in particular, continues to exhibit racial discrimination in various social areas, and they are often over-represented as criminal offenders as well as in the prisons. This issue calls for an in-depth analysis of cultural diversity and ethnicity. Lastly, the debate about gender and secularism has become part of the core agendas of multiculturalism, and their ripple effects are felt by minority groups.  To a greater extent, multiculturalism has failed to address these issues

Research objectives

The primary aim of this research is to explore different dimensions through which multiculturalism and multicultural education have extended the division more as compared to enabling integration and inclusion in education among diverse cultures. Advani and Reich (2015) refer to multiculturalism as the co-existence of diverse cultures. Culture encompasses racial, cultural, and religious groups, which manifests through cultural values and assumptions, customary behaviors, communication styles, and patterns of thinking. Multicultural education arose during the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movement, according to Acar Ciftci and Gurol (2015), and expanded as a result of the demands of different ethnic groups to be included in the curricula of colleges, schools, and universities. In higher education, multiculturalism started assuming a definitive shape in the 1980s after the universities revised their curricula, programs, and textbooks to portray a more inclusive multicultural perception (Sleeter and Carmona, 2017). This particular change that focused on minorities, women, and non-western perspectives and texts sparked a heated conversation among academics and ignited the 1980s’ and 1990s’ “culture wars.” Among the criticisms were that multiculturalism created factionalism and demeaned the foundations of western culture. Moskal and North (2017) define immigrant minorities include permanent settlers that have their own culture and language, which are unique and distinct from those of the host society. Also, this category comprises the immigrants” descendants that continuously identify themselves with their ancestral culture.

Theoretical framework

This essay utilizes the melting pot approach to address the division that multicultural education has created in England in relation to its policies that were initially meant to ensure equity in the immigrants in terms of access to education. This model postulates that the integrative policies for the immigrants foster the acculturation of both locals and non-natives through reducing the gaps between the native and immigrant milieus and lifestyle (Advani and Reich, 2015). Through this framework, I demonstrate that policies adopted with a perspective that the society needs to best converge to a core culture to some determined lifestyle tend to fail in harmonizing the lifestyles, unlike the policies adopted with the aim of converging to the average endogenous lifestyle resulting to uniformity. Averaging integrative policies indicates an intolerably high level of cultural relativism and differences.  in this paper, the flip side of multicultural education is analyzed with reference to the melting pot perspective as a solution to the division brought about by multicultural education policies

The issue of multicultural education impacts England in various ways. Berray (2019) stipulates two aspects that blur the significance of multicultural education, including the institutionalization of ethnicity and the ethnic consciousness of the ethnic English society resulting in population segregation. These two issues manifest themselves in ethnic federalism. As a result of these two aspects, ethnic groups attain the aspects of political sovereignty, which is concerned with public consciousness, political and intellectual elites of varying ethnic groups. In addition, multicultural education is a means of segregating the migrants into internal and external migrants. However, most publications, including mass media, focus on the issues of integration as well as the risk s emanating from migrants by considering both internal and external migrants as one whole (Moskal and North, 2017). Although the residents of other nations differ in their socio-cultural and moral-status, these differences are quite insignificant and widen the gap between different cultural groups.

The multicultural approach, in recent years, has been increasingly substituted by a different interculturalism, which is an intergroup relations framework. Multiculturalism, according to Moskal and North, (2017), has been blamed for the absence of integration of the immigrants. In addition, multiculturalism is linked to its role in the escalation of terrorism within Europe and therefore contracting its initial purpose. According to Rutter (2006), adoption of the paradigm of interculturalism is the most appropriate framework to effectively integrate the immigrants into the host societies as well as framing the relationships existing between different communities and cultures in more positive ways. Koetting and Malisa (1996) point out that interculturalism gives room for improved dialogue as well as the relations among different cultural groups. Rather than focusing on policies of multicultural education, there is a need to give more attention to the matters of equity with regards to the educational provision for refugee and migrant groups to achieve the vision.

In the quest for recognition and appreciation of cultural diversity, Payne and Welsh (2000) demonstrate that multiculturalism utilizes the essentialist approach to culture. Despite this approach aiming at improving the society, it assumes that every group possesses a defined number of individuals who become similar to each other and differs within other groups with respect to the circumstances of the early processes of socialization or their birth. From these findings, it is clearly shown that multiculturalism principles in education posit that every individual possesses an authentic and legitimate culture whose legitimacy is obtained via biological heredity. Similarly, the positivistic approach views culture as a form of substance that is autonomous, ideal, objective, stable, and fixed without dynamism and develops historical contexts that differ from identity. The aspect of culture, therefore, exists by the self and thus suggesting the inadequacy of multicultural education in dealing with the issue of cultural diversity in the classroom setup (Sugarman, 2015).

The key question is, how will multiculturalism ensure equality to the citizens? The answer to this question remains indecisive. According to Banks (2015), cultural discourse tends to reshape and rewrite the race discourse, which has expanded since the development of science and philosophy in the 19th century and early 20th century. It is thus presumed that the cultural rhetoric is likely to mellow racism to some extent, although the outcome similar to that of race theory associate’s individuals with their static birthplace category, and hence there is little escape. With regard to this, multiculturalism policies in education do not offer any innovative solutions to the prevailing inequality but instead provide an alternative space through which tolerance of other people’s cultures is suggested as a substitute for equality. Also, these dynamics are relied on to justice non-existence of equality in education. Multicultural education, therefore, is not the appropriate approach to the education of the immigrant but rather extends the problem of racial discrimination.

Janmaat, (2014), examines whether ethnically mixed classrooms favor the attitudes towards immigrants by examining the native adolescents across different national contexts. It is established that the effects of the out-group size are dependent on the ratio between the first and the second generation of migrant minors. This research reveals that once a particular immigrant community becomes more integrated and settles in the host country, the positive impacts of ethnic mixing would arise. The introduction of multicultural education policies would, therefore, result in more confusion in the classroom. Also, the proponents of multicultural education downplay the antiracist education with the view that it rejects culturalism and thus giving rise to a subsequent inability to content and account for the increasing phenomenon of cultural racisms. Also, Doug, (2016), claims that antiracist education tends to promote a broader political program that emphasizes on the “black subject” and fostering the bipolar black/white dichotomy. As a result of these limitations, antiracist education has the tendency to minimize the distinctive concerns and experiences of minorities.

Different from the above findings, the proponents of multicultural education have demonstrated the benefits associated with multicultural education to all learners, including the minority ethnic groups. Tomlin and Olusola (2007) state that multicultural education is not only meant for individuals of color supported by most findings, which stresses the need to stretch education across the cultural boundaries. Sugarman (2015) argues that it is vital for leaners to be given exposure to cultures that differ from their own for various reasons. Multicultural education not only promotes understanding and tolerance but also promote the leaner’s own heritage will be appreciated and understood for its uniqueness. Their arguments are therefore gravitated towards introducing students to diverse cultures other than their own to prepare them for the society outside their own community. Lastly, Acar Ciftci, and Gurol, (2015), argues that multiculturalism is crucial beyond college, classroom, and work experiences because learners will be prepared for such experiences. The

Multicultural vs. antiracist education

According to Doug, (2016), the recent years have exhibited a shift of the emphasis in multicultural education from the framework through which the key concern is addressing the leaning issues brought about the cultural diversity to the approach which actively promotes and accepts cultural diversity.  Some have, however, argued that it is no longer significant to celebrate the diversity, which is equated to patronizing token unless this initiative is augmented by a vigorous antiracist approach. The role of antiracism in this context is to combat and reveal racist practices and attitudes which limit and discriminate against the minority groups and which ultimately fosters unequal distribution of opportunities, power, and wealth. According to Modood and May, (2001), both antiracist and multicultural education were established as alternative approaches to education and race. The proponents of antiracist education have depicted the fundamental flaws inherent in the strategy of multicultural education. These findings are augmented by Nwulu, (2015), who asserts that it is practically and theoretically impossible to refute racism in and via education. In addition, multicultural education initiatives put a strong emphasis on changing the individual’s attitudes, raising the minority students’ self-esteem, and fostering cultural awareness and understanding. Mohan, (2018) refers to these features are merely incrementalism and an attempt to minimize and divert back struggle through neglecting the wider power structures and political dimension.

There are various ways through which racial forms of education have been conceptualized by both educationists and policymakers. They rejected equating racism to an individual problem as well as other related propositions upon which it can be educated awareness via simplistic and sentimental teaching about “another person,” which are the fundamental tenets from the perspective of multicultural education (Mohan, 2018). Educational stakeholders argue that racism should be understood as an aspect that is inherent in the structures, polls, and beliefs of everyday life. Tomlinson (2008) argues that antiracism gives priority to the need to address racism as a strategy for improving the outcomes of minority children and educational experiences. The antiracist convictions have signaled the need to offer appropriate organization, curricular, and pedagogical contexts that allow learners to scrutinize the way through which racism helps to maintain and rationalists’ injustices as well as the differential power given to a particular gender, class, and ethnic groups in the society.

The multicultural educational model was based on the assumption that teaching native pupils about foreign cultures and the minority ethnic learners would minimize prejudicial attitudes, prepare them for life and promote tolerance in the multiracial and multicultural society. Educationalists and policymakers were more attracted to these goals that were designed for the educational policy initiatives related to race. Nwulu, (2015) links this adoption of this concept with the ability to resonate well with the notions of meritocracy and equality of opportunity that were stipulated in the Education Act, 1944. Contrary to these concepts, Modood and May, (2001), points out that the responses to minority ethnic pupils were mainly underpinned by multicultural assumptions and premises that were highly patronizing. As a result of these, Arnot et al. (2014) refuted such thoughts by perceiving them to constitute the 3Ss, namely saris, samosas, and steel bands. The perspectives of educationalists and policymakers were vital in the provision of opportunities for minority pupils in the interest of both racial and social justice as well as improving their qualification levels and skills appropriate for the UK workforce. Also, the different ways in which the racial forms of education are conceptualized by educationists and policymakers welcomed the antiracist education.

Enactment of the antiracist education

In antiracist education, the aspect of racism is perceived as a pervasive phenomenon with multiple manifestations and meaning. The adoption of these policies is somewhat based on the premise that racism is an ideological practice that established and then melted the group distinctions with regards to the phenotypic and other variations (Arnot et al., (2014). The intent of this ideology is to create relations of both inferiority and superiority. Understanding of racism is not enough to guarantee antiracist behavior, and the antiracist educators advocate for the elimination of racism through deconstructing whiteness, and the host culture should recognize that they possess racists tendencies irrespective of their beliefs and attitudes towards the minorities. Also, minority pupils are unlikely to be racists because they have limited benefits from society’s privileges and rewards. The policy governing the implementation of antiracist education should, therefore, emphasize curricular changes, racial awareness training, and continuing education.

Research that could not be mentioned in this study

As mentioned by Mohan (2018), regarding the implication of research and practice, this empirical research should entail an assessment of different dimensions of multiculturalism in education, including an equity pedagogy, knowledge construction process, content integration, empowering school social structure, and culture and prejudice reduction. However, the research focused on the overall impacts of multicultural education and its role in widening the gap among learners of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Peacekeeping and conflict resolution, in particular, emphasizes how schools develop peace and mutual understanding among learners from backgrounds marred with conflicts and ethnic clashes. Despite the above aspects being vital for understanding multiculturalism, the time span and scope for this research could not permit investigation of each aspect quantitatively. Future research should, therefore, focus on the six dimensions as guiding principles for a holistic understanding of the implications of cultural education.

Conclusion

These researches have revealed how multicultural education has failed to exist in a more influential and meaningful form and instead caused more division. It presupposes the essentialist approach to the culture, which regards culture as a homogenous, static, and bounded aspect. Multiculturalism provides unfair advantages of the minority groups via special provisions, including exemptions from policies and laws and encouraging separatism by allowing communities to establish separate parallel societies instead of integration. Multicultural education offers minority religious and cultural learners’ unfair advantages via special provisions, including exemptions from policies and thus encouraging separatism rather than integration. This research is biased towards antiracist education because it addresses the aspect of the issue, which is central to the issue of racism and discrimination. This research, therefore, contributes to the existing literature to support the positive identity development of the learners via the utilization of pedagogical practices and content, which does not discriminate the learner on the basis of race or country of origin. With regard to the above studies, it is fair to conclude that multicultural education policies have resulted in more division.

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