Multicultural Education Means Mediocre Education :: miscellaneous

Multicultural Education Means Mediocre EducationLet me pay off this essay by stating that I am a retired incline teacher of 34 long time experience and believe that I have treated solely of my students fairly and equitably. Three times I had been named into Whos Who Among American Teachers and two of those nominations have been by minority students, one black and one Hispanic. Those students realized that my schoolroom standards were just as tough on them as they were on the majority Caucasian students and that I gave them no favoritism, slack or handicap for their minority-status ethnicity. I had perpetually refused to dumb down my curriculum (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 pith Schools slope Department had a special curriculum meeting and the Administration and my Department Supervisor w anted to change and modernize the English curriculums publications textbooks. 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 than important than teacher democratic input and the English Departments overwhelmingly selected first choice was abruptly discarded because the other more politically correct literary productions textbook series from the administratively preferred company happened to have more cultural diversity and subsequently was more multicultural. For thirty-four years I had loved teaching imaginative literature featuring such accomplished authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Alexander Dumas, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Washington Irving, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, S.E. Hinton, George Eliot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, O. Henry and pack 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 too 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 innate(p) in the West African country of Ghana and that Adoquei was a contemporary artist that loved painting landscapes.