Cover Stories: Whose America?

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The most revolutionary changes propounded by the Sobol panel are harder to identify, since they rest on a series of buried premises that are offered, sometimes glancingly, as assumptions shared by all Americans. But are they? Does everyone agree that "education should be a source of strength and pride" for diverse ethnic groups? How about the notion that teaching individuals to fulfill their own abilities is secondary to training them to participate in "cultural interdependence"? Or that U.S. children should view themselves as citizens of the world rather than of America? Are we all on the same page when it comes to the classroom as a training ground for "social action"?

And what of the following sentence: "Unlike earlier periods when one demonstrated one's intellect by how much one knew, i.e., how many facts one has at her/his command, increasingly we recognize the mark of intellect to be the capacity independently to analyze, manipulate, synthesize and critically interpret information in the interest of problem solving." In other words, it is now more important to know how to think than to have anything concrete to think about. Perhaps facts can be imported from Japan. Now, may we see a show of hands on all this?

We already have. Two members of the Sobol panel -- Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. -- inserted their dissents from the report's conclusions within the report itself. Said Jackson: "I would argue that it is politically and intellectually unwise for us to attack the traditions, customs and values which attracted immigrants to these shores in the first place." Also appended, somewhat jarringly in the prescribed context of racial and ethnic harmony, is a lengthy statement by Ali A. Mazrui, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York, Binghamton, arguing that the word holocaust should not be reserved exclusively for the Jewish experience under the Nazis. American Indians and African Americans, the professor insists, have a right to that term as well.

How did things -- not just in New York but in school systems across the nation -- get to the muddy pass epitomized by the Sobol report? Principally because an abstract theory happened to catch and ride a new wave of actuality. The idea of multicultural education in its most extravagant current form was born during the 1960s amid the campus turbulence and intellectual stimulation provoked by the civil rights movement and, later, protests against the war in Vietnam. The established centers of authority in U.S. life were not holding; to defend traditional values in the teeth of outraged demonstrations by young people was somehow to condone genocide in Southeast Asia, not to mention racism in the American South. Many deans adopted a defensive policy of giving students whatever they wanted, if only to keep them quiet. And among the things they wanted were special programs in black studies, then similar enclaves of women's studies, which were followed by successive demarcations of subject matter along racial or ethnic boundaries.