te males, it shouldnt be surprising that literature is too. We need to change the way our society view women and minorities. Trying to do this by changing the curriculum of college students is pointless. We need to start from the beginning, with the children.Children need to be taught that they exist as a part of the world, rather than just as a part of America. If worldliness is encouraged at a young age, it will replace the us and them mentality that has become prevalent throughout all age groups. This is the final result we are truly looking for. It is not equal representation of them (minorities and women) by a university dominated by them (white males). We want students to think of all people in the same way, to include all human beings in the us group, to judge them by the same standards free from stereotypes and generalizations. This is an idealistic vision, I know, but without ideals, where do we begin? Some say we begin by requiring college students to take a certain number of classes focusing on women and a certain number of classes about other races and cultures to supplement the core curriculum studying dead white males. These courses become tedious requirements, which students loath. They resent the classes because they seem like extra, unnecessary work that will have no significance in their future in American consumer society. Ultimately, they resent multiculturalism itself for the extra workload, and thus the us and them mentality is perpetuated.An argument often made by those supporting traditional liberal arts curriculum is that the styles or translations encountered when studying works from other cultures is foreign, and therefore hard to study. In grade school we study literature mainly as way of learning about grammar, writing style, and reading comprehension. If works from other cultures (age appropriate of course) were incorporated into the grade school curriculum, children would become used to different styles of...
