ABSTRACT
Education without doubt plays a pivotal role in creating citizens that help a country to unite, develop, and aspire to advancement. It is a deliberate process to develop the intelligence, characters, skills of children and young people, and an awareness of social injustice and poverty, environment, and so forth. It is also an important dimension of social stratification, because educational attainment is one of the strongest predictors of occupation, income, and well-being in later stages of life. In an increasingly diverse society in terms of ethnicity, culture, and religion, education is also seen as an important way to teach children about cultural and religious diversity and nurture appropriate attitudes towards the reality of multiculturalism (Banks, 1997; Parekh, 2006). In this chapter, which serves as a theoretical chapter, I review the literature on multiculturalism and multicultural education. I divide this chapter into two main sections. First, I discuss the contested concept of multiculturalism beginning with clarifying essential concepts of ethnicity, race, culture, religion, and minorities. I then highlight the dominant theories of cultural relations: Anglo-conformity, the melting pot, and cultural pluralism. I also discuss briefly the liberal perspective of cultural diversity and minority rights, and try to compare them with the critical perspective of multiculturalism. In the final part of this section, I provide insights into how multiculturalism in Indonesia is different from that in the liberal country contexts, particularly Canada and Australia. Second, I present a review of the concept of multicultural education, its underpinning principles, and its approaches. I argue that for multicultural education to be effectively implemented, a holistic approach should be seriously considered. To this end, I conceptualise a whole-school approach to multicultural education.
