Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine liberalism and multiculturalism within the historical and institutional context of American education. I aim to articulate a liberal theory of multicultural education that incorporates the insights of both liberalism and multiculturalism and takes seriously the historical realities of schooling. The goal, in the end, is to outline the civic purposes of education in a liberal society characterized by wide cultural diversity. A liberal theory of multicultural education avoids the fallacy of liberal neutrality common among liberal political theorists and the false fixity of cultural identity common among multiculturalists. It describes a civic education that properly insists on teaching students the substantive liberal value of autonomy, which is not culturally neutral; it teaches students nevertheless to recognize and respect the variety of cultural groups that have contributed to the nation's history and are present amongst the citizenry. In accepting and defending autonomy as a central value, liberal multicultural education takes lines of cultural identity to be permeable, broad and multiple, treating individuals as capable of choosing identities as much as inheriting them and as capable of negotiating among different identities as much as possessing but one. At bottom, a liberal theory of multicultural education attempts not to ascribe any particular cultural identity to a student but to treat the student as an unfinished product, possession of neither the state nor of his or her parents