World History Teaching and Public Education

Multiculturalism and World History Content

By Susan L. Douglass  - November 23, 1998

Multiculturalism is also an expression of expanding knowledge. The process of gathering knowledge about world cultures certainly did not begin after World War II, but it received increased impetus in the post-war period, when interest in these fields grew among scholars in the West and in developing nations. A spectrum of so-called “minority” groups in the US pressured schools to include information on the history of non-Western cultures in their programs. Multiculturalism did achieve widespread recognition that legitimate historical and geographic knowledge should be included, but the models for inclusion have been less than satisfactory to both advocates and opponents. Debate during the past decade has sputtered over how much multicultural content is too much, and even whether inclusiveness has been a “bad” or “good” idea. Much of the critique of multiculturalism may be traced to the manner of incorporating its content into curriculum and textbooks. The results fall short of expectations by its advocates, and have been judged unsatisfactory by many opponents. One possible explanation may lie in the additive formula by which most multicultural content has been included. Content on non-Western cultures has been poorly integrated into the world history narrative as a whole.

In world history programs, lessons on Africa, the Americas, China, or India are often dislocated from the whole, since they are spliced almost randomly into the main narrative of the course. After following the course of world history all the way to the fourteenth century, for example, the student is often thrust back thousands of years to cover the entire history of Africa in a few pages, only to have the topic dropped until almost the end of the course, briefly sketching the imperial exploitation of Africa, and viewing its modern situation as a reflection of global dilemmas. Other chronological anomalies seriously hamper understanding, like covering the Crusades and the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks before Islam has been introduced, or reading about the migration of Native Americans over the Ice Age land bridge a few scant pages before Columbus’s voyage of discovery is presented. Laying self-contained, parallel narratives side-by-side does not aid global comprehension, even if some content is present.

Another standard device for including multicultural content is to cite lists of achievements and influences by non-Western cultures. While legitimate, these citations remain sterile and dislocated, since students never learn when, where, and through what agents and larger historical processes these intercultural transfers took place. The limitations of this approach come into especially sharp relief when attribution of certain key achievements is shifted back and forth between cultures from one textbook edition to another. Should Arabic numerals be listed on the Arabs’ or the Indians’ scorecard? To whom is gunpowder as a military technology attributable? Who gets credit for windmills, treadle looms, astrolabes and compasses? These shifts reflect historians’ uncertainty as to the exact origin of things, but they also reflect the fact that many ideas and technologies were transferred via complex routes and relays. Contention and competition over these achievements would not be at issue if intellectual and technological transfers were integrated into a coherent narrative of geographic and temporal interaction, if students learned about the places, institutions, groups, and circumstances involved in the transfers. The story would become more memorable to students as well. Dissatisfaction on all sides concerning inclusion of multicultural content demonstrates that method and structure are important to successful incorporation of new knowledge into the curriculum.

The fact that multiculturalism became identified with contention over sub-cultural politics, curriculum time, and print space has obscured the academic significance of the movement. Similarly, the lack of a unified approach to coverage of non-Western history seemed to create a pattern of vying for a scarce resource by a variety of ethnic groups ranged against the dominance of Western civilization content in world history. The problem lies not with content from non-Western history in a general sense, but with the criteria for deciding what gets into the curriculum. Decisions based on a careful review of respected scholarship would seem a more valid criteria than political or demographic weight. Even in an ethnically and religiously homogeneous community, the past ought to be honestly presented as we know it to have been: a global tapestry woven of many cultural threads. In demographically diverse communities, cultural separatism seems less likely to arise from having knowledge than from being denied knowledge by the education system, or from acquiring knowledge of one’s heritage only within an isolated community. In the public forum of the classroom, on the other hand, knowledge gained by individuals of diverse heritages validates and tempers their experience of learning about themselves and others.

The concept of global education gradually became more attractive to many educators than the multicultural idea, particularly because a globally savvy workforce has been recognized as conferring economic advantage. World history cannot be called “global” if it omits large swaths of the earth’s human and physical geography, though it is equally obvious that a survey course would not cover every nook and cranny of the globe. A thorough assessment of respected scholarship offers a sound basis for deciding issues of depth versus breadth in coverage, and which regions receive concentrated attention for specific historical periods. The importance of studying Western history in the US is not diminished by the increased knowledge and appreciation of the historical role of non-Western civilizations, but it is diminished by banishing other significant regions and societies to darkness. It is as unjust, unscientific and dishonest to shove aside the knowledge produced by centuries of intense investigation into human history, as it is for a judge to dismiss legitimate evidence in a trial on the argument that it is “too much.”

An important civic value of history programs in a diverse society lies in providing students –whatever their background – with a global framework that helps them to understand their own particular cultural history and its relationship to that of other groups in the world, as part of an assessment of significant trends and events that affect world history as a whole.