Transcription
This is Dr. Terell Ross and the Mosaic Nation Tour Across America. This video contains excerpts of my interview with Dr. James Banks, the founder of Multicultural education.
Well, Multicultural education, I think it's important to understand that it didn't just kind of rise up one day, but it really came out of the black struggle of the 60s and 70s. So that we, my own work for example, I started in Black studies, uh, trying to help teachers deal with Black studies with a little book called Teaching the Black Experience that was published in 1969. So then you begin to get other groups, uh, such as women, people with disabilities, saying we want to be also included. And then as the movement grew, it went from Black studies to focusing really on ethnic groups in education and then to Multicultural education, which was the most inclusive term.
Well, I think the introduction to Multicultural education, uh, is probably the the easiest, uh, way to get into my work, and it's one of my most popular books, and it's short. And the older I get, the more I like short books. And so it's a short book, so I think that would probably be the easiest way to to get into my books. My work is the introdu- an introduction to Multicultural education, a book that's not its fourth edition, and I'm working on the fifth right now as we speak, or I'm supposed to be working as we speak.
And as our population becomes increasingly, uh, people of color, that's going to make it very important to educate low-income kids of color, because the largest, fastest-growing population in the schools are kids of color and second-language speakers. And so that if we don't educate kids of color, as Linda Darling-Hammond points out in her book, The Flat World and Education: The Future of America, it really lies upon, uh, educating low-income kids of color throughout our urban communities and throughout our rural communities, because that's going to be the future of who is America.
And let me tell you, China is—it's going to give us a run for our money, I think. And the one thing I, one of the important lessons I got from Beijing, as I just returned there—I was there lecturing for two weeks—is that our kids in Seattle are going to be competing not just with kids in New York, but with kids in Beijing. And let me tell you, the kids in Beijing were working night and day; they go to school literally all day. It isn't just they get out at 3:00 and then they go often to a special school after school. So that we're going to be up against—our kids in the United States are going to be up against real competition from India, from China, and from kids all over the world.
Well, I don't know, that's a good question. I think—well, we've been preoccupied with wars, I think. I mean, we've been very preoccupied with wars, I mean, and I think, um, that we, that our priorities have been—have not been about—I think part of it also is the culture of America. For example, in China, scholars are greatly respected, and teachers are greatly respected. Yet we're attacking teachers; we're attacking teachers; we're attacking unions, um, that—so I think it part of it is a cultural thing of—to value learning that we need, um, to rethink what our cultural commitments are. What is our perception of a teacher? What is our perception of the scholar? So I think it's also values, but I think we've been very concerned about, um, having more arms than any other nation, but I think we need to start thinking about how can we educate our kids better than any nation. So I think the key isn't arms or wars, or the so-called war on terror; the key is, um, how do we win the war through educating our kids?