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This is ideology masquerading as education and aspiring to psychotherapy. It demands outright lying. Not all groups in America have contributed "to the development of all aspects of our society." There is little to be said, for example, about the Asian-American contribution to basketball, about the Jewish-American contribution to the Pequot War or about the contribution of women to the Bill of Rights. Some connection could, of course, be found -- manufactured -- if one pushed it. But pushing it would be entirely in the service of ideology, not truth. American history has not been smoothly and proportionately multicultural from the beginning. Honesty requires saying so.
But honesty is not the object of the inclusion movement. Psychic healing is. The fixation on inclusionary curricula is based on the widespread assumption that the pathologies afflicting many minorities, from teen pregnancy to drug abuse to high dropout rates, come from a lack of self-esteem. Which, in turn, comes from their absorbing (as the New York task force puts it) "negative characterizations" of themselves in school books.
This argument is wrong on its face. This is the era of Cosby and affirmative action. If today's high dropout rates, drug abuse and teen pregnancy stem from negative characterizations of minorities, then 40 years ago -- the era of Amos 'n' Andy and parks with NO DOGS OR NEGROES signs -- self-esteem should have been lower and social pathology worse. Of course, the opposite is true. In 40 years negative characterizations have decreased and social pathologies have increased.
The real tragedy of this obsessive preoccupation with Eurocentrism is that it is a trap and a diversion. Of all the reasons for the difficulties encountered by the minority kids in and out of school, curricular Eurocentrism ranks, if at all, at the bottom. That New York State, in the midst of an education crisis, should be devoting its attention to cleansing the grade school curriculum of Eurocentrism is a waste, a willful turning away from real problems.
The attack on Eurocentrism did not start in the New York public schools. It started at the elite universities. Last year Stanford University changed its course on Western civilization into a curriculum of inclusion by imposing a kind of ethnic and gender quota system for Great Books.
Stanford can afford such educational indulgences. Its graduates will get jobs even if their education is mildly distorted by this inclusionary passion. Not so inner-city third-graders, whose margin of error in life is tragically smaller. And for whom any dilution or diversion of education to satisfy the demands of ideology can be devastating.
The pursuit of good feeling in education is a dead end. The way to true self-esteem is through real achievement and real learning. Politically Balkanized curricula will only ensure that our schools continue to do bad, for which feeling good, no matter how relentlessly taught, is no antidote.