ABSTRACT
Chapter Three examines Intercultural Education, a movement active between roughly 1930 and 1950, which originated among professional educators, and compares it with mainstream Multicultural Education, which emerged in the mid-1970s out of demands by racialized groups mobilized to contest and undo historic subordination to Whites.
Intercultural Education aimed to reduce tensions among racial, nationality, and religious groups. Intercultural educators shared the fundamental assumption that intergroup tensions arose from prejudice and discrimination rooted in ignorance about cultural differences. Chapter Three examines how that assumption shaped Intercultural Education’s purposes, ideas, practices, and internal disputes. While the movement’s embrace of diversity was ambivalent and tempered, Intercultural Education, nevertheless, helped to disseminate and legitimate a new view of American identity as plural and inclusive.
Beginning in the 1970s, Multicultural Education attained an extensive foothold in American education. Multicultural Education’s origins and aspirations entailed critical and oppositional impulses, which were rarely evident in Intercultural Education. Multicultural Education strove to contest the unequal political, social, and cultural power that structures the American racial order. Its founders sought not merely respect or tolerance of differences but recognition and affirmation of difference. Unlike Intercultural Education, Multicultural Education became a flashpoint in national culture wars. Nevertheless, Chapter Three argues that the logic and symbolism of Multicultural Education as practiced do not depart radically from those of Intercultural Education.
