Chapter 11: Imagining The Future: Theodore Brameld on the Frontiers of Multicultural Education

The term “multiculturalism” is of fairly recent vintage and is a term fraught with misunderstanding and politics. Mid-twentieth century educationists would not have recognized “multiculturalism” as an all-purpose term that today means anything from diversity of race to diversity of opinion. The term multicultural embraces ethnic groups, cultural groups, gender groups, and explores issues on every front including issues of sexual orientation and the physically disabled. Instead, at the half-century mark, education jargon contained words such as “inter-generational,” “inter-cultural” (Giles, Pitkin, & Ingram, 1946, p. 39), “human relations,” “human interaction,” or even “multi-racial” (Daniel, 1950, p. 388), the meanings of which today fall under that all-purpose rubric of what educators call multiculturalism. And while current educators point to individuals such as James Banks, Gloria Ladsen-Billings, or Geneva Gay, as scolars who have contributed greatly to the literature base on multiculturalism and its related programs and their spinoffs, such as “sensitivity training,” their efforts have been made easier owing to the work of others more than half a century before. In fact, the roots of multiculturalism were planted, in part, in the heady days of Progressive Era activism—and in particular, within the philosophy of Social Reconstructionism.