What is multicultural education? What are the goals of multicultural education?

Multicultural education is not a simple definition. Though the idea is very easy to grasp, the use and spreading of it in the classroom is a difficult, but rewarding challenge. Multicultural education is incorporating different people, places, religions, beliefs and differences in a classroom and making it work cohesively, with people becoming accepting and understanding of one another.

The goal of multicultural education is not simply to make the classroom diverse, but to strive for general knowledge of the different people that the class interacts with and to understand one another. A classroom that has people of a religion, beyond that of the majority religions, is something that is not always an easy task. There are students that need to perform actions, have restrictions or can not partake of activities due to restrictions and that can sometimes lead to a lack of acceptance from others. In a classroom, a teacher speaking about the differences and why they should not interfere with others and how others can grow from the experiences of the religion, is something that can be done.

The big goal of multicultural education, in my opinion, is the use of scaffolding, or the building of acceptable traits in children that become a structure to hold up the persons attitude for life. A student that has had the backing that shows them how to be nice to others, accepting of others traits and becoming a person that can identify themselves as not someone of one culture, but someone that is American and by that, I mean someone who identifies themselves as a citizen of the culture, while also being true to their own culture. This goal is complex, as many students, especially immigrants, have a hard time leaving behind or incorporating new culture ideas into their own. This is done through critical thinking, which is an important trait of multicultural education, in that it requires not only for the teacher to bring up the students to a point of acceptance, but of understanding why they need to be accepting and what they can learn from it, rather than just being told why it is important.