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.
Posted by razib at 01:24 PM