Education Commentary: What is Wrong With Allowing Students to Share the Culture of Success?

What is wrong with allowing students to share the culture of success?

As part of my teacher credential program, I was required to read an article about the importance of multiculturalism, and saying that without active support for multiculturalism, we would have “deculturalization”.   The article defined deculturalization as: “attempts to strip away the cultures of conquered peoples and replace them, through education, with European American culture”.    This definition matches the example given in the article - American Indian boarding schools of the 19^th century, where children were taken from their families, punished for speaking in their native languages during their “after school” time, and even given new names by the government agents who ran their lives.  These are not practices that we see in today’s schools.  While we still attempt to ensure that our students learn English - particularly “Academic English” (since the term “Proper English” has been determined to be politically incorrect), and to be able to understand how our society works, and how to be successful within it, we actively encourage them to maintain their home languages and cultures at the same time.

In modern American schools, it could even be argued that “deculturalization” most closely describes the way that Christians and conservatives are treated – since they are told by one “multicultural expert” after another, that their culture is wrong, unimportant, and even “evil”.  This occurs at the same time that we are told to “celebrate” and “value” diversity and “multiculturalism”.   Unfortunately, our “multicultural” schools often contain monocultural students – students who are not sharing in the culture of opportunity, success, and freedom that is America’s greatest gift to her citizens.

It is great that our classrooms can reflect the many different types of people who joined together to become Americans.  What is sad is that we are often asked not to celebrate and value the shared culture that unites us as much as we promote the differences that divide us.  The strength of America has always been that, no matter where our ancestors came from, we were Americans, journeying into the future, together.

No matter where my students’ families are from, no matter what church they attend, no matter where they go on their vacations, no matter what language they speak at home, and no matter what their parents do for a living, my goal is that all of my students will be prepared to communicate, cooperate, and compete in the “mainstream” of America – to take advantages of the opportunities that our society offers,  to expand their horizons, to dream big, to have options and choices in their lives - not be relegated to pockets of poverty and failure because they can’t communicate or navigate outside of their own neighborhoods.

The only way to achieve that result is to promote a culture of success in my classroom.  The fact is that there are only two cultures that can possibly exist in a classroom: the culture of success, and the culture of failure.  A classroom can have one, the other, or a competition between the two different cultures.

I spent most of my adult life in the military, which is highly integrated and is made up of people from many different cultures, even as it is monocultural due to a shred military culture and mission. In the US military, Americans of a wide variety of backgrounds work together towards common goals.  What my experience with varied groups of students has taught me is that every student is an individual, and the only two cultures that matter in the classroom are the culture of success and the culture of failure.  Successful students share several common traits; they arrive on time, bring their materials, and are prepared to work and learn.  My goal is to have all of my students join the classroom culture of success.  This requires that students “buy in” to the classroom culture, and desire to be either successful, and/or part of the classroom culture.

The culture created and maintained in the classroom doesn’t have to be the same as the culture that the students experience in other places, such as at home.  It needs to be a culture of success, centered around learning to work together and be responsible as an individual.  The classroom culture needs to prepare students to participate in the larger American culture as they grow up, rather than restricting, limiting, and trapping them in subcultures that do not provide the same opportunities for success that exist in “mainstream” America.

Let's make sure that we raise future generations of American to celebrate not just the diversity of their families' backgrounds, but also the unifying aspects of our shared nation - and the cultural norms and traditions that will allow them to be a successful part of our shared nation and society.