ABSTRACT
My purpose in this article is to challenge readers, and indeed the very way that multicultural education is practiced in schools in general, to move beyond tolerance in both conceptualization and implementation. It is my belief that a movement beyond tolerance is absolutely necessary if multicultural education is to become more than a superficial “bandaid” or a “feel-good” additive to our school curricula. I will argue that tolerance is actually a low level of multicultural support, reflecting as it does an acceptance of the status quo with but slight accommodations to difference. I will review and expand upon a model of multicultural education that I have developed elsewhere (See Sonia Nieto, Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education, Longman, 1992) in order to explore what multicultural education might actually look like in a school’s policies and practices.
