A few months ago I was talking to a friend. I mentioned that though I oppose multiculturalism as it is taught now, I favor courses that would give students of culture X a factual perspective on cultures A, B, C....

The problem with multiculturalism courses today is that they are:

• Therapy sessions for ethnic minorities.
  
• Not heavy on facts, but loaded with value judgements.
  
• Those judgements, though couched in relativist jargon, often betray Western underpinnings in the way the facts are filtered.
  
• Many individuals learn what they already knew, and in advanced courses it is often a case of coethnics studying their "own culture."
  

A polycultural education, which gives a broad sweep of various cultural traditions, their ways of thought, and modes of expression can be a crucial supplement to a Western worldview. Not only would there be an elaboration on the reality that "the West" is in part a synthesis of various cultural strands and has engaged in liberal borrowings from other cultural complexes,¹ but an understanding of the basics of other cultures allows students to have a set of points from which to calibrate judgements about Western culture itself! (I would suggest appreciate, but that is somewhat value laden, I assume students would see the important uniqueness of the Enlightenment tradition after studying the ways of the Indians or Chinese)

1 - One feature of the modern West (or modern civilization) is that it has evolved for evolvibility, to use a evolutionary analogy.