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To the surprise of many doubters, the work and the students turned out by such programs were often first rate. These supposedly marginal areas of academic inquiry produced information -- about the achievements of women, facets of life outside the U.S. mainstream, the work of minority artists, Americans whom history had ignored -- that rattled the complacency of orthodox humanities departments. And many of the graduates of these programs remained in academe, either studying for advanced degrees or earning tenure as teachers.
While they moved up the rungs, something else was going on. The 1965 Immigration Act passed by Congress had reversed a policy, in place for four decades, of favoring Europeans and making things tough for other applicants. Suddenly people from throughout the Third World found it easier to enter the U.S., rapidly changing the demographics of the nation. Between 1980 and 1990, the white non-Hispanic majority in Los Angeles County turned into a minority. In the U.S. as a whole during the same decade, the number of Hispanics increased by 53% to 22.4 million, roughly 9% of the nation's population. The Dade County, Fla., school district, the nation's fourth largest, now includes students from 123 countries.
The new immigrants came for the same reasons that had propelled their predecessors: to escape poverty, hopelessness or oppression, to seek economic opportunities and to live in freedom. This huge influx of people can be seen as the latest affirmation of American values, of the global allure exercised by the ideals on which the nation was founded.
But that is not the vision conveyed by many of the multiculturalists, those veterans of the '60s and their younger colleagues, who looked at the people ( arriving in their classrooms and noticed that many of them, in some cases nearly all of them, had no connection whatsoever with Europe. As Sobol himself has noted, "By the year 2000, 1 out of 3 children in New York public schools will be minority. In New York City, 1 out of 4 children under 10 has non- English-speaking immigrant parents. This is not the world of the 1950s."
Why, then, were these children being forced to learn a history that derived almost exclusively from Western thought and examples? This was a good question that was probably answered too quickly by teachers and administrators on the front lines: No reason, no reason at all. In their defense, these educators faced formidable problems -- students who did not speak English, classrooms disrupted by the clash of different mores and patterns of behavior confined in close quarters. Also, there was the troubling matter of school dropouts and of the persistent underperformance of some blacks and Hispanics, as compared to that of most Asians and whites. Blame for all this could not be placed on children who lacked the preparation or the motivation to learn, so the fault must lie with what they were being taught.