Donaldo Macedo

The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation.

Contributes to a radical formulation of pedagogy through its revitalization of language, utopianism, and revolutionary message...The book enlarges our vision with each reading, until the meanings become our own. Harvard Educational Review Constitutes the voice of a great teacher who has managed to replace the melancholic and despairing discourse of the post-modern Left with possibility and human compassion. Educational Theory

Dancing with Bigotry

As James Baldwin so succinctly points out, many white Americans prefer not to be reminded of the “appallingly oppressive and bloody history” of racism that has characterized the very fabric of U. S. society. In fact many, if not most, white Americans from various ethnic backgrounds would feel extremely uncomfortable if the curriculum in schools incorporated an antiracist pedagogy that asked, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, is everyone welcome in the hall?”

Multiculturalism Permitted in English Only.

The authors of this article discuss the discriminatory practices through language in both multicultural and bilingual education. Bilingual education promotes academic instruction in the native language, to varying degrees, while multicultural education stresses the need to valorize and appreciate cultural differences as a process during which linguistic minority students come to voice. However, in multicultural education, the underlying assumption is that coming to voice takes place in English only. Conversely, while bilingual education offers some degree of native language use, standard native languages are preferred while students’ vernaculars are denigrated and ignored, rendering bilingual education colonial-like in nature. Critical and anti-colonial literature, educational research, and current events are used to construct and support the authors’ basic argument that, in order for education to truly be liberatory, it must be respectfully communicated in the vernacular of the students themselves, particularly when these students come from subordinated populations.

Beyond the Methods Fetish

As we discussed in chapters 1 and 2, the field of multicultural education and the education of linguistic minority students has been mostly defined by a plethora of methods designed primarily to teach tolerance. These methods not only blindly embrace the hidden (and sometimes not so opaque) assumption that the intolerable features of the “other” will be altered, reformed and, ultimately assimilated into an invisible culture of whiteness that serves as the yardstick against which cultural differences are measured. These methods also overemphasize teaching as a form of management of cultural differences while de-emphasizing learning, which is usually characterized by complexity, contradictions, and resistance. By focusing primarily on teaching methodology with respect to the education of culturally different students, even well-intentioned educators who want to give subordinated students voice fall prey to the weight of their complicity with the dominant ideology, which often remains beyond interrogation. With the exception of a handful of critical multiculturalists such as Christine Sleeter, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, David Goldberg, among others, most multicultural education as practice by many white liberals often refrains from deconstructing the dominant ideology that informs and shapes the asymmetrical distribution of cultural goods.

Language as Racism: A New Policy of Exclusion

As Dinesh D’Souza and other cultural commissars falsely proclaim the end of racism, language has become the last refuge to wantonly discriminate with impunity. Often these cultural commissars rely on selective history, as Lou Dobbs, a CNN commentator, astutely quoted Theodore Roosevelt to make the case that to be an American “does not allow for divided loyalties” and that speaking a language other than English is tantamount to disloyalty. Leaving aside the blatant contradictions inherent in Roosevelt’s definition of what it means to be an American, what is never interrogated is the undemocratic proposition stating that in order to be, one must stop being. That is, to be an American requires that immigrants commit both cultural and linguistic suicide since, as Roosevelt insisted, “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism” (Crawford, 2004, p. 67). In essence, these cultural commissars fail to acknowledge that the requirement to blindly assimilate so that one can become an American represents also a quasi cultural genocide that is designed to enable the dominant cultural group to consolidate its cultural and linguistic hegemony. As correctly pointed out by Amilcar Cabral, the ideal for cultural domination can be reduced to the following: The dominant cultural group (1) liquidates practically all the population of the dominated country, thereby eliminating the possibilities for cultural resistance; or (2) succeeds in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people—that is, harmonizes economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality (Cabral, 1973, p. 40).

Tongue-Tied Multiculturalism

In the preceding chapter we began to highlight the importance of language in the construction of human subjectivities. Although the literature in multicultural education correctly stresses the need to valorize and appreciate cultural differences as a process for students to come to voice, the underlying assumption is that the celebration of other cultures will take place in English only, a language that may provide students from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds with the experience of subordination. In this chapter we discuss the issue of language and its role in multicultural education, particularly in the multicultural debate in the United States, where the issue of language is often relegated to a secondary status. In fact, some multiculturalists, without saying so, assume that multicultural education can be effectively implemented through English only. Such an assumption neglects to appreciate how English, as a dominant language, even in a multicultural classroom, may continue to devalue students and speakers of other languages. In other words, one cannot celebrate different cultural values through the very dominant language that devalues, in many ways, the cultural experiences of different cultural groups. Multiculturalists need to understand that language is the only means through which one comes to consciousness.

Racism as a Cultural Factor

So far, we have proposed that in order to understand the systematic devaluation of “otherness” along the lines of race, culture, and ethnicity, we need to critically examine the colonial legacy that continually undermines our democratic aspirations. However, to do so would require that we reconnect with our past so as to critically understand that beneath the aura of democracy lies a colonial historical will that has bequeathed us the rampant social inequality that exists today. Once we become cognizant of the colonial ideology that still informs our so-called democratic society, we can begin to create structures that will lead to a total decolonization so as to achieve a truly cultural democracy.

Literacy: Reading the Word and the World.

Literacy wikipedia, literacy data published by unesco displays that since 1950, the adult literacy rate at the world level has increased by 5 percentage points every decade on average, from 557 per cent in 1950 to 862 per cent in 2015 however, for four decades, the population growth was so rapid that the number of illiterate adults kept increasing, rising from 700 million in 1950 to 878 million in 1990. Word walls classroom strategies reading rockets, a word wall is a collection of words which are displayed in large visible letters on a wall, bulletin board, or other display surface in a classroom the word wall is designed to be an interactive tool for students and contains an array of words that can be used during writing and reading.