Dimensions of Justice

“Chaos with transportation and student transfers during the first week of the new school year overshadowed what officials say was a historic event for Durham—the beginning of a truly integrated public school system” (The Herald-Sun, August 29, 1994, B-1). In the wake of a blazing controversy about how to put everything into motion, Durham city and county schools merged.

“This is the best of times and the worst of times. ...” said Superintendent C. Owen Phillips about the first week of the 1994–1995 school year (Ibid). For better or worse, change was the operative word in Durham Public Schools. The school district was in a state of perpetual motion as parents, students, principals, teachers, and other school personnel experienced the first school year under Phase II of the forced merger of two separate and unequal school districts, which called for a new student reassignment plan. During the previous two years, school administrators were moved, replaced, promoted, and demoted in an effort to merge the two separate districts.

The extremely controversial merger plan, which was designed to racially balance Durham’s public schools, sent 6,000 students in the fall of 1995 to different schools. To many parents and community members, the future of the school district depended on the success or failure of the student reassignment plan. Many community leaders believed that it was still too soon to merge the districts, even after decades of planning.

In the third millennium, there seems to be an accelerated rush toward changing or reinventing the way America works. Among the Clinton Administration’s primary goals was the development of a 21^st-century telecommunications and information infrastructure that would serve all Americans, according to the late Ron Brown, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce. This National Information Infrastructure was envisioned by the Administration as a tool to help break down barriers of language, distance, and economics by encouraging exchanges of ideas, nurturing cultural appreciation, and fostering an awareness of commonality (Brown, 1994).

A continuing theme throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries has been the demand for the reform of schooling in the United States. One of the reforms pushed by various ethnic groups as an alternative to the traditional education written into many school policies was the concept of multicultural education. More and more ethnic groups began to demand inclusion of their histories and cultures in the curriculum. There have been many widely differing conceptualizations of multicultural education. Some of these will be discussed in Part I. Many of the programs seem to have conflicting priorities and purposes. As a consequence, some educators consider multicultural education a quick fix, lacking substance. Furthermore, superfluous activities, such as highlighting holidays only, contribute little to any serious development of the field. As Henry Louis Gates (1990) says, “The mindless celebration of difference for its own sake is no more tenable than the nostalgic return to some monochrome homogeneity (p. xix).

What is multiculturalism, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? We’ve been told it threatens to fragment American culture into a warren of ethnic enclaves, each separate and inviolate. We’ve been told that it menaces the Western tradition of literature and the arts. We’ve been told it aims to politicize the school curriculum, replacing honest historical scholarship with a “feel good” syllabus designed solely to bolster the self-esteem of minorities. The alarm has been sounded, and many scholars and educators, liberals as well as conservatives, have responded to it” (p. 174).

According to Professor John S. Mayher (1990) of New York University, the solution is “to recognize that genuine cultural literacy only derives from meaningful encounters with the cultures one is to become literate in” (p. 43). He continues, “Cultural literacy must be understood as a two-way street; its acquisition, like the acquisition of the rest of language, is dialogic, based on both the learner’s growing sense of what she wants and needs to understand about the world she lives in and the culture’s prior experiences about how to best convey this” (p. 44). Because cultures are fluid in that they can and do change, the culture appropriate for one generation might not be meaningful to its successors.

Gates suggests that we try to think of American culture as a conversation among different voices, each conditioned by a different perception of the world (1990, p. 175). What did the English teachers’ voices in Durham, North Carolina, say about multicultural approaches to learning?