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Essay on Multicultural Education in America

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Multicultural Education in America

America has long been called "The Melting Pot" due to the fact that it is made up of a varied mix of races, cultures, and ethnicities. As more and more immigrants come to America searching for a better life, the population naturally becomes more diverse. This has, in turn, spun a great debate over multiculturalism. Some of the issues under fire are who is benefiting from the education, and how to present the material in a way so as to offend the least amount of people. There are many variations on these themes as will be discussed later in this paper.

In the 1930's several educators called for programs of cultural diversity that encouraged ethnic and …show more content…

A national standard is out of the question because of the fact that different parts of the country contain certain concentrations of nationalities. An example of this is the high concentration of Cubans in Florida or Latinos in the west. Nonetheless, teachers are at the top of the agenda when it comes to multiculturalism. They can do the most for children during the early years of learning, when kids are most impressionable. By engaging students in activities that follow the lines of their multicultural curriculum, they can open up young minds while making learning fun. in one first grade classroom, an inventive teacher used the minority students to her advantage by making them her helpers as she taught the rest of the class some simple Spanish words and customs. This newly acquired vocabulary formed a common bond among the children in their early years, an appropriate time for learning respect and understanding (Pyszkowski 154). Another exciting idea is to put children in the setting of the culture they are learning about. By surrounding children in the ideas and customs of other cultures, they can better understand what it is like to be removed from our society altogether, if only for a day. Having kids dress up in foreign clothing,

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