Against The Multicultural Agenda

This is a pioneering work, timely, scholarly, and grounded in critical-sociological, anthropological, and philosophical traditions. It offers an empathic analysis of pluralist, Afrocentric, and postmodernist advocacies of multicultural education and multiculturalism, but reveals formidable flaws in their conceptions of gender, race, culture, knowledge, learning, and social change. It is required reading for those desiring a synopsis of the literature on multicultural education and multiculturalism, and an understanding of the disputes among the various schools of thought. The author claims that multiculturalism is ^Inot^R a remedy for problems of sexism, racism, and educational underachievement among ethnic minorities. Rather, so questionable is multiculturalisM's endorsement of biological classifications, so relativistic and moralistic are its arguments on cultural differences, and so negligent its analysis of human reasoning that it has become a political pawn. Read Against the Multicultural Agenda to discover what is wrong with the multicultural agenda and what is powerfully persuasive about the alternative—critical thinking.

This is a pioneering work, timely, scholarly, and grounded in critical-sociological, anthropological, and philosophical traditions. It offers an empathic analysis of pluralist, Afrocentric, and postmodernist advocacies of multicultural education and multiculturalism, but reveals formidable flaws in their conceptions of gender, race, culture, knowledge, learning, and social change. It is required reading for those desiring a synopsis of the literature on multicultural education and multiculturalism, and an understanding of the disputes among the various schools of thought. The author claims that multiculturalism is not a remedy for problems of sexism, racism, and educational underachievement among ethnic minorities. Rather, so questionable is multiculturalism's endorsement of biological classifications, so relativistic and moralistic are its arguments on cultural differences, and so negligent its analysis of human reasoning that it has become a political pawn. Read Against the Multicultural Agenda to discover what is wrong with the multicultural agenda and what is powerfully persuasive about the alternative—critical thinking.

Booknews

Webster, author of "The Racialization of America" (1992), assesses multicultural education proposals, directing his comments at reasoning processes, the coherence of definitions of key terms, and the analytical depth of observations. He demonstrates significant inadequacies in the social scientific and philosophical foundations of multicultural education and multiculturalism<-->such as the use of certain anthropologists' conceptions of separate races and single cultures and their affiliations with realist and postmodernist currents in philosophy<-->and introduces education reform proposals grounded in critical thinking principles. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

YEHUDI O. WEBSTER teaches in the Sociology Department at California State University.