ABSTRACT
Education and race relations are both contested areas of study and intervention; so it is hardly surprising that multicultural education, which straddles the two, should have become a site for ideological debate and conflict. This chapter examines the nature of that debate and that conflict, and takes critical look at those ideologies, that are called radical or Marxist. Setting on one side conservative and reactionary ideologies, the debate about multicultural education can, I think, be conceptualized, without too much simplification, as a contest between two competing ideologies, liberalism and radicalism, and as such forms part of a wider debate about the relationship between schools, or the education system, and society. Of special significance for the debate about multicultural education are the disagreements between Marxists, and between Marxists and liberals, over race and racism. Anti-racist teaching comes in as many shapes and sizes as multicultural education.
