James A. Banks: Cultural Diversity in Education: Foundations, Curriculum, and Teaching. New York: Routledge, 2016.
“As cultural, ethnic, language, and religious diversity increases in the United States and the world, the challenge of educating citizens to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society deepens.” Banks asserts that this diversity “enriches the nation because it provides alternative ways to view the world and to solve social, economic, and political problems.” It simultaneously poses a new problem, “how to balance diversity and unity,” so that Americans continue to enjoy “a shared civic community in which all groups participate and to which they have allegiance.” Banks would avoid “cultural repression and hegemony” while avoiding “ethnic and cultural separatism and the fracturing of the nation-state.” He claims that this will require “substantially reformed” school curricula and “social structure[s]” and educators who “acquire new knowledge, commitments, and skills.”
By deploying the term ‘culture’ instead of ‘regime,’ Banks obscures the matter. “Culture” is the key word for anthropologists and sociologists; for them, ‘culture’ consists of ‘mores and folkways.’ Its political equivalent would be ‘way of life.’ Aristotle’s key word, ‘regime,’ comprehends not only a political community’s way of life but its rulers, its ruling institutions, and its purpose(s). Despite the seemingly unpolitical terms he deploys, Banks obviously intends a regime change or revolution, both in the schools and in the United States. The rulers of American schools would reorient their hearts and minds; they would alter the ruling institutions of the schools. School curricula, embodying the purpose of the education on offer, would also be “substantially reformed.” In all, “the goals, norms, and culture of the school” would be transformed into a condition of “educational equality” for all students, whatever their “racial, ethnic, and social-class” character. That is, the purpose of the schools will be a form of political egalitarianism, inasmuch as Banks conceives of “educational” equality as dependent upon all the dimensions that rule educational life.
This rule consists of five dimensions: “content integration;” the “knowledge construction process;” prejudice reduction, an “equity pedagogy; and “an empowering school culture and social structure.” What does this jargon mean? Content integration means “the extent to which teachers use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in their subject area or discipline.” Knowledge construction means “help[ing] students to understand, investigate, and determine how the implicit cultural assumptions, frames of reference, perspectives, and biases within a discipline influence the ways in which knowledge is constructed within it.” That is, whereas content integration appears to take diverse cultural materials for the purpose of illustrating ‘abstractions’ within each discipline, knowledge construction implies the more radical claim that the abstractions themselves are not really abstract; what one calls knowledge is really constructed by cultures. To put it in Platonic-Socratic terms, there is no ‘ascent from the cave’ of opinion, since there is finally nothing more than opinion.
Prejudice reduction aims at modifying “students’ racial attitudes” by means of “teaching methods and materials.” Although knowledge is only cultural, and most cultures imbue certain attitudes toward ‘race,’ multicultural education attempts to alter those attitudes, transforming the existing American culture or way of life, evidently in the direction of substantially increased egalitarianism. This begs the question, Where does the principle of egalitarianism come from? From what does it derive its moral and political authority, if not (according the claim of multiculturalism) some culture? Equity pedagogy confirms this egalitarianism with regard to ‘equality of opportunity’; it consists of teaching methods that “will facilitate the academic achievement of students from diverse racial, cultural, and social-class backgrounds.” Not only will teaching methods do this, but the design of the school’s ruling institutions will “empower” these students. As Banks’s argument unfolds, however, it won’t be so much the students who are empowered, and assuredly not elected school boards, but teachers and administrators. Multicultural education will empower them because it demands a particular kind of specialized knowledge in, yes, multicultural education, a kind of knowledge unlikely to be possessed by members of the general public and only to be achieved by students as they work their way through the program of multicultural education.
With regard to content education, Banks adjures that “the infusion of ethnic and cultural content into the subject area should be logical, not contrived.” He then proceeds to contrive an example of content that illustrates the political inflection of his project. In “language arts,” students may study Ebonics, the English dialect spoken by many African-Americans, by reading and listening “to speeches by such African Americans as Martin Luther King, Jr., Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, Marian Wright Edelman, Al Sharpton, and President Barack Obama”—evidently not speeches by such African Americans as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Condoleeza Rice, or Candace Owens. Evidently, Ebonics speaks ‘Left,’ and only ‘Left.’ In history, content education will include “study about the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Iroquois and other highly developed civilizations that developed in the America prior to the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century.” Will such practices as child sacrifice, slavery, cannibalism, and genocide, practiced by some or all of those highly developed civilizations, receive the same attention the atrocities committed by Europeans receive? Evidently not: “concepts such as ‘The New World’ and ‘The European Discovery of America’ are not only ethnocentric and Eurocentric terms but are also normative concepts that serve latent but important political purposes, such as justifying the destruction of Native American peoples and civilizations by Europeans such as Columbus and those who came after him.” Indeed, “The New World” is a concept that “subtly denies the political existence of Native Americans and their nations prior to the coming of the Europeans.” Never has newness carried such weighty political freight. Yet when Miranda looks at the rogues assembled in the last scene of The Tempest and exclaims, “O brave new world, that has such goodly creatures in’t!” and her father gently corrects her with “‘Tis new to thee,” one notices in European civilization a certain self-awareness about the newness of the New World and of its newest discoverers. Is multiculturalism itself not a product of Western civilization, at the same time being one of a long list of claims to rule which characterize every ‘civilization.’
What justifies multicultural education? Banks explains that we live in “global times,” by which he means that “migration within and across nation-states is a worldwide phenomenon” which exists to a degree seen “never before in the history of the world.” Hundreds of millions now live “outside their nation of birth or citizenship.” This amounts to 3.1% of the world population. Given the fact that this is still a very small percentage of the world population, why does it justify regime change in American education? And, given the admitted need for political union in any nation-state, lest it disintegrate, why would ordinary methods of civic education not suffice to meet the challenge of political ‘acculturation’?
The answer lies not in “global times” but in Banks’s reconception of rights. “The assimilationist conception,” whereby education is understood to ‘acculturate’ immigrants in accordance with the ‘norms’ of the American regime—regards “the rights of the individual as paramount and group identities and rights as inconsistent with and detrimental to the freedom of the individual.” This is misstated. The natural rights defended by the United States Constitution as it was understood by its framers inhere in human beings as such, and therefore in individuals. The natural rights of persons belonging to a particular ethnic or linguistic group differ in no way from those belonging to any other group. The practical problems arise in securing those rights by matching civil rights and duties to the natural rights those rights and duties are intended to secure. Banks quotes the leftist historian Eric Foner, who claims that it was the Abolitionists, not the Founders, who were “the authors of the notion of freedom as a universal birthright.” In so saying, Foner is either mistaken or lying. The “authors” of the notion of freedom as a universal birthright were the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The authors of the document which acknowledged those natural rights were Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Continental Congress who revised his original draft. The authors of the document that established the governing institutions which secured those rights for American citizens were the Framers of the Constitution. The slaves were not citizens; the founding generation made many of them citizens in the northern states but not in the southern states. The Abolitionists wanted to extend slave emancipation to the southern states but could find no way to do so. Their solution was to accept the dismemberment of the Union, which would have done nothing to emancipate the slaves. Abolition only occurred as a result of a vast civil war, foolishly initiated by the southern secessionists, who expected to win it. None of this had anything to do with “group rights.” This notwithstanding, Banks insists that “a differentiated conception of citizenship recognizes that some groups must be treated differently in order for them to attain equity.”
He also contends that “groups with power and influence usually define their interests as the public interest and the interests and goals of marginalized groups as ‘special interests.'” He overlooks the tendency of “marginalized” groups to do exactly the same thing. Hence the refusal of those who adhere to the claim that “black lives matter” to admit that “all lives matter.” Banks classifies self-identification of human beings into four categories: cultural (race, ethnicity, gender, language, “sexual orientation”), national, regional, and global. This ignores self-identification as individuals and as families. Why does he ignore such obvious categories? Because they interfere with socialism, his obvious regime choice. They interfere with socialism because the ineluctably natural categories of person and family interfere with the ‘groupishness’ that socialism needs and also with the historicism modern socialism endorses. His socialism diverges from older forms of modern socialism because another category he excludes from self-identification is socio-economic class; his version of ‘consciousness’ centers on culture as conceived by anthropologists and sociologists, not on class.
The most immediately political form of self-identification is nationality. Here he does address the regime question, although superficially. “In democratic nation-states, each student should develop a commitment to democratic ideals, such as human dignity, justice, and equality,” a commitment shared by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All very well, but what should students in China be developing a commitment to? Or students in Russia? Or in Iran? The regimes in those countries utterly despise “democratic ideals.” Are those regimes, are those ‘cultures,’ to be brought to the bar of human rights? And, if ‘culture’ is determinative of cognition, how is that possible? And why is it justified?
Understandably, Banks prefers to focus on the democratic regimes. His teachers would ensure that students respect nationality while avoiding nationalism. “Some attention should be devoted to a discussion of patriotism, which is a love and devotion to one’s country.” “Teachers should help students understand that people who love their country may have very different views on national events and developments and that criticism of the actions of government leaders is not necessarily unpatriotic.” It is not. On the other hand, it might be quite unpatriotic. So, for example, a substantial number of German-Americans in the 1930s joined groups that excused the Nazi regime in ‘the old country,’ invoking George Washington’s Farewell Address as justification for non-involvement in European wars. Their dissent was not necessarily patriotic, although it was unquestionably nationalistic, in this instance Germanophilic. Although Banks assures his readers that “students can develop a reflective and positive national identification only after they have attained reflective, clarified, and positive cultural identifications,” he offers only the writings of Will Kymlicka as proof of this—a slender reed. What we do know is that a non-nationalistic patriotism is quite possible when founded upon the principles of American constitutionalism, as seen in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the two world wars. It cannot guarantee that Americans will ‘live up to’ those principles any more than socialists can guarantee that instruction in accordance with their principles will guarantee conduct consistent with them.
“Global identification” poses additional problems for Banks. He deems it necessary “because we live in a global society in which the solutions to the world’s problems require the cooperation of all the nations of the world.” If so, I can only wish the world the very best of luck, given the sharp differences among the regimes ruling those nations. “Most students,” he laments, “have rather conscious identifications with their communities and nation-states, but they often are only vaguely aware of their status as world citizens.” No surprise, there: no one could be more than vaguely aware of his status as a ‘world citizen’ because no one is a world citizen; no one is a world citizen because the world has no civitas. The world does have the ‘law of nations,’ but this depends for its enforcement on the more powerful regimes in the world. Those regimes often do not agree with one another, as they adhere to moral and political principles that not only differ from one another but contradict one another. This becomes obvious even from Banks’s curricular suggestions. Remarking that students have “very few heroes or heroines, myths, symbols, and school rituals…designed to help students develop an attachment to and identification with the global community,” he can only point to Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Kofi Annan as examples. I deem it unlikely to be a coincidence that all of these persons are ‘men of the Left.’ Teachers “should realize that it is vitally important for students to develop a sophisticated understanding of their roles in the world community,” but if there is no real world community then sophistication will incline toward sophistry. And so, if “an important priority of civic education should be to help students develop global dispositions and the ability to think about community and national issues from a global perspective and to use a global lens to view issues, problems, and possible solutions,” such dispositions, such a perspective, and such a lens either will dilute their attachment to their regime by confusing students about the principles at stake, or it will tend to form American students into emulators of Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Annan rather than, for example, of Washington and Lincoln—neither of whom was a ‘globalist’ although both upheld natural rights. Banks prefers to quote an author who lauds “the possibility of both engagement in and enchantment with the world.” The religious language is apt, inasmuch as logic evidently has nothing much to do with this project.
Banks hopes for “a delicate balance of identifications,” which turns out to be governed by “democratic values exemplified in the constitutions of democratic nation-states, such as justice, human dignity and equality.” Again, on what basis? What justifies a given ‘culture’? What justifies a given political regime—which, according to Banks, depends upon a ‘culture’?
He nonetheless confidently recommends the production of “transformative citizens” in schools. Transformative citizens comprise the highest level of citizenship, in Banks’s rank ordering. Merely “legal” citizens have rights and obligations to their nation-state but don’t participate in its governance; “minimal” citizens get out to vote for “conventional candidates and conventional issues”; “active” citizens go beyond voting by writing to their elected representatives, campaigning for candidates, and so forth; “transformative” or “deep” or “postconventional” citizens take action “to actualize values and moral principles beyond those of conventional authority.” That is, they intend to change the regime; whether violent or non-violent, they are revolutionaries. Transformative citizens “promote social justice even when their actions violate, challenge, and dismantle existing laws, conventions, and structures.” That’s the kind of citizenship Banks has in mind. Students in elementary, middle, and high schools should be given a “reimagined and transformed” civic education that “effectively educates students to function in the twenty-first century,” by which he means that ‘the knowledge that underlies its construction needs to shift from mainstream to transformative academic knowledge,” a form of knowledge that “consists of paradigms and explanations that challenge some of the key epistemological assumptions of mainstream knowledge.” That would be deep, indeed, were we to suppose that Banks and his fellow multicultists rank with (for example) G.W.F. Hegel, who did indeed work out a new kind of logic, whatever one may think of it.
According to Banks, “mainstream citizenship education” grounded in “mainstream knowledge and assumptions” fails to “challenge or disrupt the class, racial, and gender discrimination within the schools and society,” nor does it prepare them for “what their role should be in a global world.” It emphasizes memorization of “facts about constitutions and other legal documents, learning about various branches of government, and developing patriotism to the nation-state” without inculcating “critical thinking skills, decision making, and action.” By these lights, it must be astonishing that revolutionaries schooled in the old liberal arts could have conceived of the things they did. It is hard to resist the thought that “transformative citizenship education” in “transformative academic knowledge” preparing students “to challenge inequality within their communities, their nations, and the world,” to “develop cosmopolitan values and perspectives,” and to “take actions to create just and democratic multicultural communities and societies” would serve not so much philosophic deepness but an ideological rigor of the Left.
Consistent with the rhetorical strategy useful for the implementation of his project, Banks offers a history of American education beginning not with the Founders but with the late 19th century ‘nativist’ movement. Banks remarks the anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant edge to nativism, ignoring the fact that George Washington had welcomed Catholics, Jews, along with all major Protestant denominations then in the United States on the basis of their natural right to freedom of religion. Nativism, therefore, flatly contradicted the principles of the American regime and of the education conducted in that regime in accordance with those principles. “The outbreak of the Great War in Europe in 1914 greatly increased the suspicion and distrust of immigrant groups in the United States,” Banks notices, without explaining why Americans might not be suspicious of newly-arrived persons who might incline to supporting one side or another in a foreign conflict, potentially embroiling the United States in that conflict. He acknowledges that the same period saw an intensification of what he calls “the assimilationist ideology,” which was obviously Americans’ attempt to do what every regime (including the one Banks favors) does, namely, to persuade children that the principles of the regime are true. “What in fact happened, however, was that most of the immigrant and ethnic cultures stuck to the bottom of the mythical melting pot,” as “Anglo-Saxon culture remained dominant,” inducing “other ethnic groups…to give up many of their cultural characteristics in order to participate fully in the nation’s social, economic, and political institutions.” But if all cultures are ‘relative,’ equally valuable, what could be wrong with that? Unlike the African slaves, the other immigrants came to their, ahem, ‘new world,’ voluntarily. And as for changing “cultural characteristics,” what else does Banks propose, in his educational regime?
Not that everything about “Anglo-Saxon culture” was bad. On the contrary, Banks allows, the influence of that culture “has been, in many cases, positive,” with its “ideals of human rights, participatory democracy, and separation of church and state.” He gives no reason for adjudging these “ideals” “positive.” Such an attempt would involve him in an ‘ascent from the cave,’ the possibility of which he has already denied.
Banks traces subsequent efforts to accommodate immigrant and other groups more fully into the American ‘culture.’ These include Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism,” Hilda Taba’s “intergroup education,” William Connolly’s “new pluralism.” and finally Banks’s “multicultural education,” which requires not only curricular reform but “total school reform,” including alteration of “the ethnic and racial composition of the school staff, its attitudes, the formalized and hidden curricula, the teaching strategies and materials, the testing and counseling programs, and the school’s norms” as well as “the languages and dialects of the school” and “community participation and input.” “The reform must be systemwide, or systemic, to be effective.” It is what any serious political thinker will see as a regime change in the schools aiming at regime change in the country in which it is undertaken. Students will become “bicultural”—as “comfortable within the adopted culture as he or she is within his or her primordial or first culture.” This suggests that multiculturalism in any profound way is impossible, inasmuch as it would require the integration of many different languages, “norms,” and so on within the same human soul, and to do so within every human soul in the school. But even bicultural education would require a selection of elements from each of the two ‘cultures’ selected, inasmuch as any two ‘cultures’ will feature aspects incompatible with one another. Again, ‘democracy,’ ‘equality,’ and similar locutions will govern this selection, but where do these come from, if not (as Banks has already conceded) from the Anglo-Saxons?
Inasmuch as the origin of an idea doesn’t necessarily determine its content, there is no reason to suppose that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideas (or ‘French’ ideas, or ‘Chinese’ ideas) are not universally valid, except that Banks has already claimed that even mathematics and science are ‘cultural’ products, marked by ‘cultural hegemony.’ In terms of ‘social studies,’ for example, Banks argue that describing the collision of United States citizens with Amerindian nations and tribes in the Midwest as “The Westward Movement” is Eurocentric. “The Lakota Sioux were already in the West”; they weren’t moving at all. (They had, of course, undertaken their own westward movement only a few generations earlier, occupying lands settled by other Amerindians nations and tribes, but Banks doesn’t mention that.) Such a unit in a history class “might be called ‘The Invasion from the East,’ if viewed from the Sioux perspective. “An objective title for the unit might be ‘Two Cultures Meet in the Americas.'” But two ‘cultures’ might meet without warfare. What really happened was that two regimes met, two regimes animated by principles and practices that contradicted one another, leading to war and to the victory of one regime over the other—a common enough occurrence, throughout the course of human events, even within ‘cultures,’ as seen in intra-European, intra-Asian, intra-American, and intra-African wars.
To avoid ethnocentricity, Banks applies his “transformative” approach to curricular reform. This involves “the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference and content from various groups that will extend students’ understandings of the nature, development, and complexity of U.S. society.” So, for example, when studying the American Revolution, students would learn “the perspectives of the Anglo Revolutionaries, the Anglo Loyalists, African Americans, Indians, and the British.” Very good, but this begs the question: who was right? “The emphasis…should be on how the common U.S. culture and society emerged from a complex synthesis and interaction of the diverse cultural elements that originated within the various cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious groups that make up U.S. society.” But evidently, according to Banks, there is no really common U.S. culture, only a “mainstream” culture, which he intends to undermine and replace with elements borrowed from “marginalized” cultures, all arranged in an egalitarian regime pattern which itself derives from members of, well, the dominant culture, such as himself. He adds to this academic exercise a call “to require students to make decisions and to take actions related to the concept, issue, or problem they have studied.” This will “empower them,” “help[ing] them to acquire a sense of political efficacy.” But for what purpose, if not to advance the political regime envisioned by Banks and the schools that adopt his program?
Thus, the first part of Cultural Diversity in Education is philosophically incoherent but quite systematic politically. It is likely that Banks understands this, that his ‘theoretical’ claims are aimed at obfuscating the revolutionary character of his politics. And yet the second part of his book essays a discussion of just those “conceptual, philosophical, and research issues” that bedevil his presentation of his “transformative” educational politics.
He begins with the definition of ‘culture’ offered by the well-known anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhorn: “culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially attached values.” As mentioned earlier, this amount to what Aristotle understands as one component of a regime, namely, its Bios ti or way of life. Banks adds that cultures are “dynamic, complex, and changing” but also ‘systematic’ in the sense that “any change in one aspect of a culture affects all of its components.” Within many cultures or “macrocultures” “microcultures” also exist. These microcultures differ from the macrocultures in language, “learning styles,” and many other characteristic Banks has already remarked, but each microculture shares “to some extent” the “national values” upheld by the culture or way of life that predominates in the national state.
“Multicultural education suggests a type of education concerned with creating educational environments in which students form a variety of microcultural groups such as race/ethnicity, gender, social class, regional groups, and people with disabilities experience educational equality.” To achieve such “equality,” multiculturalism must be “critical,” a term Banks explicitly borrows from “critical race theory,” a term critical race theory in turn borrows from Marxism (as in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy). This now leads Banks to include economic class and politics in his notion of “ethnicity.” That is, unlike Aristotle, who regards a way of life as a subset of ‘regime,’ Banks follows the anthropologists’ model that makes ‘regime’ a subset of culture. Thus ‘ethnicity’ has little to do with biology, as the root of the word suggests. For example, “some African Americans have so few cultural traits that are Black and so little identification with African Americans as an ethnic group that we might call them ‘Afro-Saxons.'” The same goes with groups whose national origins differ from their existing national location.
Banks claims that “intergroup problems frequently arise, not because of the nature of the cultural differences between Whites and people of color, but because of the race of the individual or group who exhibits the specific cultural characteristic.” So, Mexican children may be punished for speaking Spanish in school but if whites learn Spanish, if may be “viewed as a useful and esteemed language.” Banks does not pause to consider that the whites in question are likely speaking Spanish in a Spanish class, whereas the Mexican children might be speaking it in order to say things a non-Spanish speaking teacher doesn’t understand. “This kind of racism can be called cultural racism.” On the other hand, it may not be racist at all. It may be the act of a teacher trying to run a class.
How to explain academic disparities between whites and “people of color”? Banks dismisses explanations based on genetics, going so far as to claim that “race is a social construct.” He also dislikes the “cultural deprivation” argument, which holds that persons of color suffer from “poverty, fatherless homes, and social disorganization” resulting in “cognitive deficits” over time. He remarks that this explanation conflates “cultural difference” with “conditions of poverty.” He rejects the notion that difference in culture should be interpreted as a form of deprivation because it violates “the principles of cultural democracy.” If cultural democracy means treating all ways of life as equal, it undoubtedly is. He endorses Amy Gutmann’s demand that “civic equality recognition require schools to recognize the community cultures and languages of students from diverse groups,” but one must then ask, ‘Recognize’ them in what ways and on what basis? If Banks and Gutmann reply, ‘On the basis of equality,’ why so?
The “cultural difference” paradigm “rejects the idea that students of color have cultural deficits”; on the contrary, “African Americans, Mexican Americans, and American Indians have strong, rich, and diverse cultures.” Academic underachievement arises not from cultural deficiencies but from “cultural conflicts.” Therefore, “the school must change in ways that will allow it to respect and reflect the rich cultural strengths of students form diverse groups and use teaching strategies that are consistent with their cultural characteristics.” Banks calls this “equity pedagogy.” As usual, Banks does not provide a criterion by which one can confirm that what he calls rich cultural strength are indeed rich or strong.
Banks also rejects explanations based on “cultural ecology,” which maintain that cultural minorities score low on tests because they resist education itself as ‘white.’ He counters that the resistance is not to education but the use of education to achieve cultural assimilation. He prefers the explanation of “protective disidentification,” a process whereby students feel threatened by academic expectations that alienate or seem to degrade them and react by reducing their efforts to meet those expectations. Lower test scores follow.
Seeing that he needs some sort of moral criterion for making the judgments he makes, Banks turns to a comparison of “cultural pluralist ideology”—he now acknowledges cultural pluralism as an ideology, dropping the philosophic pretensions he had paraded earlier—with “assimilationist ideology.” Pluralism deems “cultural and ethnic identities” to proliferate “in pluralistic Western societies,” as various groups champion their own “economic and political interests.” “The energies and skills of each member of a cultural or ethnic group are needed to help in that group’s liberation struggle. Each individual member of the group has a moral obligation to join the liberation struggle. Thus, the pluralist stresses the rights of the group over the rights of the individual.” It must be said that the shift from calling this a philosophy to calling it an ideology comes just in time, inasmuch as the “thus” does not follow logically from the premise. It is obvious that the rights of individuals might easily provide the basis for claims of equality, even if the need to organize politically—itself an individual right—will be indispensable to securing those rights.
More plausibly, cultural pluralists regard minority cultures as important sources of “psychological support” for persons living in “a modernized society controlled primarily by one dominant cultural, economic, and political group.” Since these cultures “are well ordered and highly structured but different from each other and from the mainstream dominant culture,” school curricula “should be revised to reflect the cognitive styles, cultural history, and experiences of cultural groups, especially students of color”; this will reduce their “learning and adjustment problems.” This in turn will begin to provide students with “the skills and commitments needed to participate in civic action to help empower their cultural group.”
In his account of the assimilationist ideology, Banks sees a strong confidence in the, well, transformative power of modernity. “The assimilationist tends to see ethnic attachments as fleeting and temporary within a modernized world,” considering “the modern state as universalistic rather than characterized by strong ethnic allegiance and attachments.” Such attachments are deemed “dysfunctional in a modernized civic community”; they “harm the goals of the modern nation-state” by leading to “the Balkanization of society.” In America, assimilationists endorse “values” such as those enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. “The school’s primary mission within a democratic society should be to socialize youths into the national civic culture” by promoting “a critical acceptance of the goals, assumptions, and possibilities of democratic nation-states.”
Banks situates his own “multiculturalist ideology” between those of pluralism and assimilationism. Calling pluralism “useful” because “it informs us about the importance of culture and ethnicity within a society and the extent to which ethnic groups determine the life chances of individuals,” he criticizes it for exaggerating “the extent of cultural pluralism within modern societies,” in view of the “high levels of cultural (if not structural) assimilation” that occurred in the United States and other similar countries. Cultural identities overlap. In failing to recognize this, or in resisting it, pluralists “appear reluctant to prepare students to cope adequately with the real world beyond their ethnic or cultural community.” They have not “clarified, in any meaningful way, the kind of relationship that should exist between competing ethnic groups that have different allegiances and conflicting goals and commitments.” They cannot say how “a strongly pluralistic nation will maintain an essential degree of societal cohesion.”
As for assimilationists, they do understand the need for “societal cohesion” and design their educational goals and methods accordingly. They fail not so much in their conception of goals but in their methods because “learning characteristics” are not uniform, across culture. They “assume that all students can learn equally well from teaching materials that reflect only the cultural experiences of the majority group.” Banks charges that assimilationists “ignor[e] the reality that most Western societies are made up of many different ethnic and cultural groups.” He offers little or no evidence that assimilationists ignore that reality; indeed, the term ‘assimilationist’ suggests that there are diverse materials to be assimilated. What he really wants to do is to address the regime question, the question that the anthropological concept, ‘culture,’ tends to obscure: “Who defines the common culture? Whom does the definition benefit? Whom does it harm?” Those are political questions. According to Banks, “the common culture needs to be redefined with broad participation by different cultural, ethnic, and language groups,” thereby “reflect[ing] the social realities within the nation, not a mythical, idealized view.”
But why so? To be sure, any regime must take account of the different ‘cultures’ or ways of life amongst the populations it rules. As part of the regime, schools must do the same. But the regime will still need to choose among the so-called ‘values’ and practices seen in the various groups. Social “realities” are one thing, the sources of moral and political principles quite another. But this is what Banks’s cultural egalitarianism denies—sort of. Except when it comes to such terms as ‘democracy,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘equity,’ and so on.
What, then, has he in mind? “In the multicultural, open society envisioned by the multicultural theorist, individuals would be free to maintain their ethnic identities” while participating “effectively within the common culture and across other ethnic cultures.” In a crucial admission, he writes, “Individuals would be free to act consistent with the norms and values of their ethnic groups as long as they did not conflict with the overarching values in a nation state,” such as (in the U.S.) “ideals such as justice, equality, and human dignity,” along with “toleration and recognition.” Indeed, “all members of society would be required to conform to the nation’s idealized values.” Banks modestly, and correctly, allows that “it is very difficult to resolve satisfactorily all the difficult questions inherent within” multiculturalist ideology. He nonetheless insists that it “must” be implemented. Indeed, “ways must be devised for marginalized ethnic groups to gain power in education and to participate in major educational decisions that affect the education of their youths.” One should notice that school boards, elected by majorities in local elections, would likely need to relinquish their authority to multiculturally-inclined professional educators. This has been a major problem with ‘Left’ conceptions of ‘democracy,’ a regime paradoxically inclined toward the imposition of self-defined ‘equality’ from above. Leninist vanguardism was a pathological instance of this, but other instances abound.
The ‘democratic’ elites Banks favors will engage in “transformative”—i.e., revolutionary or regime-changing—research, which “tries to see the world through the eyes of the people being studied.” But this alone cannot suffice, inasmuch as any competent researcher into the variety of regimes will do, and has done, exactly that, for millennia. That Banks does have something more in mind may be seen in his selection of W.E.B. Du Bois as his example of a transformational researcher. “Du Bois challenged the established historical research that stated that Northern Whites and Southern Blacks incompetently ruled the Southern states during Reconstruction,” showing that “it was during Reconstruction that the Southern states enacted their most progressive legislation, including the establishment of public schools.” Yes, but define ‘progressive.’ Multiculturalism opposes the claim that knowledge is “neutral and objective and that its principles are universal.” But except for the term ‘progressive,’ Du Bois’s revision of “established historical research”—much of it done by ‘Redeemer’ historians politically opposed to the regime change Reconstruction attempted—stands or falls on two bases: facts and a judgment concerning governmental competence. If the criteria for selection of the relevant facts and judgment about them are “compassion and a deep concern about justice and equality,” will these be defined in terms of the “overarching values” of the American “nation-state,” or by some other set of criteria, as suggested by the demand to include minority groups in the political process, while simultaneously giving that process over to educationists?
With all that, Banks’s multiculturalism addresses a real issue, on those occasions when it comes down to earth. He cites a study conducted to find the causes of “poor performance on standardized achievement tests” by Amerindian students. The study found that teachers failed “to explain to the students the importance of the test,” resulting in “lack of student concern about test results.” Teachers also tended to denigrate Navajo “culture and language,” an approach which was indeed very unlikely to win their cooperation. The study found “a cultural mismatch between the home and the school,” a mismatch which would require a reconsideration of the teachers’ methods of instruction.
In Part III of his book, Banks addresses the “teaching strategies” consonant with multicultural education. He identifies six “stages” whereby a student can emerge from the limited horizon of his minority ‘culture.’ Initially, the student suffers from “cultural psychological captivity,” a condition in which “the individual absorbs the negative ideologies and beliefs about his or her cultural group that are institutionalized within the society.” Then the student experiences “cultural encapsulation,” a self-protective stance when he “participates primarily within his or her own cultural community and believes that his or her cultural group is superior to other cultural groups.” Perceived threats to that group provoke anger; he finds a “separatist ideology” attractive. Thus, the first two “stages” are ‘dialectical’ in the Hegelian-Marxist sense of contradictory antinomies, thesis and antithesis.
Stage 3 amounts to an initial synthesis: “identity clarification.” Now, “the individual is able to clarify personal attitudes and cultural identity, to reduce intrapsychic conflict, and to develop clarified positive attitudes toward his or her cultural group,” learning the “self-acceptance” Banks deems “a requisite to accepting and responding positively to outside individuals and groups” with a “pride in his or her cultural group [that] is not based on the hate or fear of outside groups.”
The fourth stage occurs when the new synthesis develops a new antimony, called “biculturalism.” This is “a strong desire to function effectively in two cultures.” That is, the new antimony is experienced not as a painful conflict but an erotic longing; the student’s soul has moved from Hegel’s Phenomenology to Plato’s Symposium, so to speak. The final synthesis begins to take shape in the fifth stage, “multiculturalism and reflective nationalism.” Having integrated a second culture into his soul, the student keeps on going, now “able to function, at least beyond superficial levels, within several cultures within his or her nation and to understand, appreciate, and share the values, symbols, and institutions of several cultures within the nation,” experiencing “a more enriched and fulfilling life” ready to “formulate creative and novel solutions to personal and public problems.” By “the nation,” Banks assures us, he means one governed by such “idealized values” as “human dignity and justice.” At the same time, this idealism has been synthesized with realism—an understanding of the United States “as the multicultural and multilingual nation that it is.”
In the final stage of multicultural education, the student has enlarged his soul still further into “globalism and global competency,” with the “abilities needed to function within cultures within his or her nation as well as within cultures outside his or her own nation in other parts of the world.” Even more remarkably, “this individual has internalized the universalistic ethical values and principles of humankind,” along with “the skills, competencies, and commitments needed to take action within the world to actualize personal values and commitments.” He will be a ‘citizen of the world,’ a true Brussels sprout, prepared for world government at the end of history.
Banks outlines a curriculum for students at each of these developmental stages. At Stage 1, students “best benefit from monocultural content and experiences that will help them to develop cultural awareness and a heightened sense of cultural consciousness,” learning “how their cultural group has helped to liberate as well as to victimize other cultural, racial, and ethnic groups.” In Banks’s example, “White students” learn “not only about how Whites have oppressed African Americans and Native Americans, but also how Whites have helped these groups to attain justice and rights within our society.” Oddly—but perhaps not so oddly, given his ideological leanings—Banks lauds John Brown as a figure to be studied without so much as mentioning Abraham Lincoln, a rather more thoughtful and historically important figure.
The Stage 2 curriculum consists of an inward turn, a sort of therapy. Students are granted “an opportunity to examine and understand their hostile feelings toward outside cultural groups”—this, on the assumption that students “develop more positive feelings toward themselves and others only when negative feelings toward other groups are uncovered and expressed in a safe and democratic environment.” The third stage curriculum, guiding the first synthesis, is “designed to reinforce the student’s emerging cultural identity and clarification.” Here, Banks avails himself of the techniques of ‘values clarification,’ pioneered in the 1970s by such educationists as Sidney B. Simon, Merrill Harmon, Leland W. Howe, Louis Raths, and Howard Kirschenbaum. ‘Values clarification’ aimed at decentering the student’s existing moral principles (called ‘values,’ a term borrowed from economics by sociologists) by means of arguments based on moral relativism, thereby compelling them to reformulate his own ‘value system,’ helpfully guided by (of course) the teacher, whose own ‘values’ crucially inflect the outcome. In effect, Banks’s “multicultural education” does this on an even grander scale. [1] One sees this many times in the course of the book, as when he pauses to recommend some “tentative conclusions” that “might” be reached when students address questions on affirmative action, housing discrimination, and school desegregation.
The fourth, “bicultural,” stage’s curriculum leads to understanding another culture in its own terms. This brings the student to the final stage, resulting in “a global sense of cultural literacy” and a consequent exposure to “moral and value alternatives” other than those of his own culture. At the same time, Banks expects the student to “embrace” ‘values’ “such as human dignity and justice, that are needed to live in a multicultural community and global world society.” Cultural, national, regional, and global ‘identities’ will all be balanced, albeit “never totally,” Banks hastens to caution.
All of this aims at regime change founded upon the “transformative academic knowledge” so yielded, in which students “must be given opportunities to construct knowledge themselves so that they can develop a deep understanding of the nature and limitations of knowledge,” which, Banks again claims, “reflects the social, political, and cultural context in which it is formulated.” Banks thus proposes an educational project that does not so much attempt to leave the Platonic-Socratic cave of one’s regime by a philosophic ascent guided by reason but to move the student ‘horizontally’ (democratically, if you will) by expanding the boundaries of his ‘cultural’ territory. Socrates’ rational construal will give way to Banks’s cultural construction and reconstruction. Because he regards such figures as Socrates as culture-bound, he rejects the traditional canon that has been “used to define, select, and evaluate knowledge in the school, college and university curriculum of the United States and in other Western nations,” a canon that “has traditionally been European-centric and male-dominated.” His anthropological notion of ‘culture’ precludes him from considering that reason or revelation might transcend ‘culture,’ making the culture in which a line of reasoning or an insight of revelation irrelevant to its truth.
Part of the difficulty stems from Banks’s egalitarianism. Philosophy and prophecy are not widely experienced. Banks wants students to achieve something like the effects of philosophizing and of prophetic insight by a means accessible to everyone. It is a kindly thought.
It is not necessarily an accurate or equitable one. For example, he writes that “from the perspective of the Lakota Sioux, the Anglo settlers in the West were invaders and conquerors.” Undoubtedly so, but from the perspective of the Lakota Sioux, their own settlement of that territory was also a westward movement, whereas from the perspective of the half dozen or so Amerindian nations and tribes the Sioux warriors defeated upon arrival, they were invaders and conquerors. Similarly, we read that “ethnic heroes selected for study and veneration” in schools “are usually those who helped Whites conquer or oppress powerless people rather than those who challenged the existing social, economic, and political order.” Leaving aside the question of whether nations like the Iroquois, the Sioux, and the Comanche were really “powerless people,” did the ‘Whites’ not challenge the existing social, economic, and political order of Amerindians? Regimes get challenged quite often, by all manner of people. The more important questions are, What is the character of the regime being challenged? Are the challengers right? Perspectivism doesn’t get you to philosophy.
Banks nevertheless insists, “a curriculum designed to empower students must be transformative in nature and must help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values needed to become social critics who can make reflective decisions and can implement their decisions in effective personal, social, and civic action,” thanks to a curriculum in which “multiple voices are heard and legitimized.” But how so, if they contradict one another? And if this curriculum “can teach students to think” by learning “to consider the author’s purposes for writing or speaking, his or her basic assumptions, and how the author’s perspectives or point of view compares with that of other authors and resources,” why do Banks’s examples always point in one direction? At times this leads him to rather odd pairings, as when he invites teachers to have their students compare Christopher Columbus’s journal entry on the Taino people he encountered in the Caribbean with an archeologist’s imagined reconstruction of “a day in the life of the Tainos” coupled with a 1992 story set 500 years earlier about a twelve-year-old Taino girl. Banks lauds empathy, but empathy isn’t the same as imagining things. A better Banksian proposal is to teach “a key concept, revolution,” by studying “three American revolutions”: the Pueblo Revolt of 1680s, the 1776 revolution by the American colonists, and the Mexican Revolution of 1810. This is simply an exercise in what academics call comparative politics, and one need not be a multicultist to undertake it.
The real aim of all this is social action. Predictably, the choice of actions will be guided by teachers who serve as cultural mediators and agents of “change,” teachers who “help students understand the desirability of and possibility for social change,” going so far as to encourage the students’ “sense of moral outrage.” What sort of change? Outrage triggered for what purpose? Well, “many such teacher participated in social action in the 1960s and 1970s to promote social justice and civil rights” as those things were propounded by the New Left. (He’s evidently not talking about such ‘Sixties phenomena as Goldwater Girls or Students for Nixon.) Banks rightly observes that “teaching, like social science, is not a value-free activity,” but his “involved observers” of student action “should support and defend moral and ethical positions that are consistent with democratic values and ideals” as defined by Tom Hayden, Eldridge Cleaver, and Mark Rudd.
Despite his Popper-like rhetoric about openness and democracy, Banks uses the word “must” with great frequency, as in his averral that teachers “must be informed, critical, socially conscious, and ethical change agents who are committed to social, political, cultural, and educational equality.” Another example: “To create democratic and just schools, colleges, and universities, the established concepts and knowledge systems must not privilege any particular racial, ethnic, social-class or gender group, but must reflect the experiences of the diverse groups that make up the nation-state. Consequently, the cultures of the nation’s schools, as well as the curricula, must be reformed in ways that institutionalize and legitimize the knowledge systems, perspectives, ideologies, and behaviors of diverse ethnic, racial, cultural, social-class, and language groups. This requires that more liberatory and multicultural paradigms and canons be constructed and institutionalized within the nation’s educational institutions.” It can hardly be said that Banks himself doesn’t know what a regime is, although his presentation of educational and national regime change in anthropological and sociological terms might obscure his knowledge from his readers. Whether offering “egalitarian books and stories” on “sex-types” to students aged three to five or claiming that mental retardation and giftedness are “socially constructed categories,” and most obviously when urging educators to “attempt institutional or systematic reform of the total school,” Banks consistently urges his readers to demand changes derived from ‘Left’ ideology, often in the guise of arguing for perspectivism. The disadvantage of doing so is that he never gets around to justifying his claim to rule, by turns to ‘culture’ and to ‘science,’ neither of which can account for its basis in terms of moral and political reasoning. This can lead to some moments of exquisite comedy, as when he writes, “Teachers with an assimilationist ideology will most likely teach a unit on the U.S. Civil War differently than will teachers with a multicultural ideology.” He is thinking of the ‘perspectives’ of slaves and Indians, but a truly multicultural teacher might well begin with a lesson infused with empathy for the slaveholders.
Banks concludes with several “principles for teaching and learning in a multicultural society.” Among them is the recommendation that “the curriculum should help students understand that knowledge is socially constructed,” along with the complaint that “students often study historical events, concepts, and issues only or primarily from the points of view of the victors.” “This kind of teaching privileges mainstream students—who most often identify with the victors or dominant groups—and cause many students of color to feel left out of the American story.” Since students of color most likely benefit from a revolution animated by the principle, ‘all men are created equal’; since they also benefit from a civil war in which the winners abolished slavery; since they benefit from victory over the Axis in the Second World War; since they benefit from the victory of the civil rights movement over proponents of laws segregating the races, it might be argued that the perspective of the winners can be quite salubrious. British imperialists, Southern oligarchs, Nazi tyrants, and ‘unreconstructed’ white bigots were the ones who were “silenced, ignored, or marginalized” by those victories. Neither triumphalism nor the valorization of the defeated will be encouraged by a ‘social-studies’ pedagogy affirming natural rights and the kind of regimes that secure them.
Note
- For a discussion of ‘values clarification’ and its roots in John Dewey’s educational theories, see Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey: Our Culture ‘Left’ or ‘Right’: Littératteurs Confront Nihilism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, pp. 101-122.
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