Racial Tensions in the Classroom

In the whole of your long article, “Little Progress Made With Classroom Racial Tensions” (Sept. 21), there is not a single word to suggest that the “multicultural” approach to dealing with racial and ethnic tensions simply may be a bad idea. The assumption behind multicultural education seems to be that just knowing about each other is going to defuse the tensions that we have seen between ethnic and racial groups. You should try asking the Serbs and the Croatians about it, or the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, since they have all lived together for centuries and certainly know about each other quite well.

The article itself admits, as does a similar piece in your new “Voices” section, that superficial “tourist-multicultural” education actually makes things worse. What would make them better, presumably, would be a more serious and intensive presentation. Good luck. These are the schools that can no longer effectively teach even the basics of reading, math or American history, and now we expect them to teach detailed cultural histories of China, Africa, Korea, Japan, the Middle East, Latin America, Vietnam, the Philippines, Armenia, and who knows what else? The truth is that harmony comes from some shared principles of identity. It used to be that schools taught what it meant to be an American and that those principles overrode any old differences among Irish, Italians, Russians, Germans, Scots, etc. Now the idea of being an American seems to be regarded as some kind of fascism dismissed as the “dominant-culture.” We may have to ask again what it means to be an American, but it is a question to which there must be an answer, or we will go the way of Lebanon or Yugoslavia.

KELLEY L. ROSS

Van Nuys