ABSTRACT
Multicultural education is a social movement within education that seeks to transform the organization, practice, and ideological content of schooling. This chapter examines the rhetoric of multicultural education as a melodrama. The melodrama is one kind of moral order typically constructed by social problems claims-makers, including multicultural educators. The most salient attribute multicultural education (MCE) reformers assign to school children, especially those from ethnic and racial minority groups, is their powerlessness within schools. Multicultural rhetoric attributes to culturally different students an interest in changing how schools and other social institutions operate, and argues that MCE should empower those students to take action. The moral drama of multiculturalism casts "Anglocentric" schools as the villains. Multiculturalists' collective presentation of self defines their identity in opposition to that of Anglocentric schools and educators. The multiculturalists' melodramatic rhetoric undercuts their claim of empowering culturally different students. The victim identity assigned to these students makes them ultimately dependent upon the multicultural educator-heroes for their liberation.
