Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Education :: miscellaneous

Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Educationlet me begin this essay by stating that I am a retired incline teacher of 34 years experience and believe that I break treated on the whole of my students fairly and equitably. Three times I had been named into Whos Who Among American Teachers and ii of those nominations have been by minority students, one foreboding(a) and one Hispanic. Those students realized that my classroom standards were just as tough on them as they were on the majority Caucasian students and that I gave them no favoritism, drop or handicap for their minority-status ethnicity. I had always refused to dumb down my computer program (Grammar, Vocabulary, Literature, Writing Skills) to accommodate students that lacked motivation, desire, curiosity, cooperation, respect for teacher authority and a willingness to learn. A year before I retired in 1999 my Middle Schools English section had a special political program meeting and the governing body and my sec tion Supervisor wanted to change and modernize the English curriculums literature standards. The choice eventually narrowed down to two distinct textbook series (grades six-to-eight) and my schools nine English teachers voted on which companys series to incorporate into the schools English curriculum. Obviously administrative fiat (and pressure and trends from the State Department of Education) was more important than teacher democratic input and the English Departments overwhelmingly selected first choice was abruptly discarded because the separate more politically cover literature textbook series from the administratively preferred company happened to have more cultural diversity and afterward was more multicultural. For thirty-four years I had loved teaching visionary literature featuring such accomplished authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Alexander Dumas, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, capital letter Irving, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, S.E. Hinton, George Eliot, Sir Arth ur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, O. Henry and James Thurber. Apparently the fact that all of the aforementioned authors were white was a major problem because most of them had been effectively excluded in the newly acquired literature texts. The old literature texts and program were overly white-oriented and were not consistent with New Jersey and USA politically correct trends in multicultural education.The new eighth grade literature textbook featured on its cover a painting of Sam Adoqueis Portrait of Rockney C. A statement inside the text indicated that Sam Adoquei was born(p) in the West African country of Ghana and that Adoquei was a present-day(a) artist that loved painting landscapes.