Multicultural Education: How We Prepare To Educate Children For The Global Economy
In the realm of multicultural education, the children's exposure to assimilate themselves into diverse cultures reflects the social reality not only of America but the world-over that its populace comprises of minority peoples other than them. It impacted on the American culture because children learned to respect differences, appreciate gender equality, and tolerate races other than their own. America, after all, has become a global nation.
Schools may have their own approaches on how multiculturalism is integrated into their policies, system, processes, programs, curriculum, human resource, and practices. The incorporation done, no matter how different or similar it could be, it has surely finds its way strategically into the perspective of children that ethnocentricity, discrimination, gender inequality and intolerance are detrimental to the development for all.
Children become aware that people cannot survive in isolation and that the world out there is beyond the perceived dominant American culture and politics. With an open and broader mindset inculcated in them, they figured it out how applicable and realistic it is to take this thinking outside and bringing it with them in all aspects of a person's life and in all stages of development as it networks with other people s and global economy.
Equipped with a multicultural perspective, children can do better and will know how to conduct and sustain interrelationships with different races in the business world. It serves as a guide for them to have successful business overseas for they have acquired skills at school such as learning to tolerate and work harmoniously with others whose cultural, political and social backgrounds are widely distinct and dissimilar from them.
With diversity, their business rules and regulations, operations and management mirrors the market they are serving and this is crucial and critical as they are the ones who patronize their products and services. These people are the key players in business survival. They can either build and sustain or break the profits. It means then that no group of people has to be overlooked for they are a part and parcel of the society and much more, an essential component of the global society.
These children can carve a niche for their chosen industry in the future based on the lessons brought by multicultural education. Having been equipped with capabilities, they can cater to the existing requirements inasmuch as create the needs of the consuming public, a highly diverse community.
The children's potentials are more honed and bolstered because the type of education given them has been fused with global perspective in which business is among those facets confronting the global environment. Their understanding and know-how are not restricted or solely to one group which usually belongs to the dominant culture.
The minority groups such as African Americans, Latin Americans, and Asian Americans when taken as one surprisingly comprise a huge number to reckon with. Aside from them, count in the immigrants and refugees whose numbers are increasing. Consider also the largely populous countries of China and India who have been coming over America and are distributed all over the world. It is not a big surprise then that a "Chinatown" virtually exists in, if not all, countries.
When these peoples are overlooked in the business, it has a bad economic repercussion. Situate this globally and when they are excluded, surely the economy is deprived of their productivity and definitely has bad impact in the entire world, in which among others the economy is on the brink of losing its lustre.
America could no longer claim dominance ever since the start of the civil rights movement during the 60's for it has been acknowledging and recognizing the phenomenon known as globalization and earlier on has engaged itself internally in the pursuits of holistic development for all to be attuned with the rapidly changing global environment where a monocultural-based system can no longer be applied.
Multicultural Education Research Centers
- Center for Equal Opportunity
- National Association for Multicultural Education
- National MultiCultural Institute