Word: sobol
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...multiculturalism is again in the glare of public attention, thanks to the release of a report recommending changes in the way social studies are taught in New York State public schools. State Education Commissioner Thomas Sobol, responding to complaints from a number of minority groups, chose a panel of 24 educators to review the curriculums in history and related courses. One of their tasks was to suggest innovations that would improve students' understanding of "the cultures, identities, and histories of the diverse groups which comprise American society today." Some critics predicted that the report, a year in preparation, would...
They were right, although this report avoids the blistering tone of an earlier Task Force on Minorities, also commissioned by Sobol, that hit its controversial stride in the opening sentence: "African-Americans, Asian- Americans, Puerto Rican/Latinos and Native Americans have all been the victims of an intellectual and educational oppression that has characterized the culture and institutions of the United States and the European American world for centuries...
...most revolutionary changes propounded by the Sobol panel are harder to identify, since they rest on a series of buried premises that are offered, sometimes glancingly, as assumptions shared by all Americans. But are they? Does everyone agree that "education should be a source of strength and pride" for diverse ethnic groups? How about the notion that teaching individuals to fulfill their own abilities is secondary to training them to participate in "cultural interdependence"? Or that U.S. children should view themselves as citizens of the world rather than of America? Are we all on the same page when it comes...
...already have. Two members of the Sobol panel -- Kenneth T. Jackson of Columbia University and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. -- inserted their dissents from the report's conclusions within the report itself. Said Jackson: "I would argue that it is politically and intellectually unwise for us to attack the traditions, customs and values which attracted immigrants to these shores in the first place." Also appended, somewhat jarringly in the prescribed context of racial and ethnic harmony, is a lengthy statement by Ali A. Mazrui, Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York, Binghamton, arguing that...
...things -- not just in New York but in school systems across the nation -- get to the muddy pass epitomized by the Sobol report? Principally because an abstract theory happened to catch and ride a new wave of actuality. The idea of multicultural education in its most extravagant current form was born during the 1960s amid the campus turbulence and intellectual stimulation provoked by the civil rights movement and, later, protests against the war in Vietnam. The established centers of authority in U.S. life were not holding; to defend traditional values in the teeth of outraged demonstrations by young people...