hough the debate at Stanford University ran muchdeeper than I can hope to touch in this paper, the root of the problem was asfollows: In 1980, Stanford University came up with a program - later knownas the "Stanford-style multicultural curriculum" which aimed to familiarizestudents with traditions, philosophy, literature, and history of the West. Theprogram consisted of 15 required books by writers such as Plato, Aristotle,Homer, Aquinas, Marx, and Freud. By 1987, a group called the RainbowCoalition argued the fact that the books were all written by DWEM's or DeadWhite European Males. They felt that this type of teaching denied studentsthe knowledge of contributions by people of color, women, and otheroppressed groups. In 1987, the faculty voted 39 to 4 to change thecurriculum and do away with the fifteen book requirement and the term"Western" for the study of at least one non-European culture and properattention to be given to the issues of race and gender (Gould 199). Thisdebate was very important because its publicity provided the grounds for theargument that America is a pluralistic society and to study only one peoplewould not accurately portray what really makes up this country.Proponents of multicultural education argue that it offers students abalanced appreciation and critique of other cultures as well as our own(Stotsky 64). While it is common sense that one could not have a trueunderstanding of a subject by only possessing knowledge of one side of it,this brings up the fact that there would never be enough time in our currentschool year to equally cover the contributions of each individual nationality. This leaves teachers with two options. The first would be to lengthen theschool year, which is highly unlikely because of the political aspects of thesituation. The other choice is to modify the curriculum to only include whatthe instructor (or school) feels are the most important contributions, whichagain leaves them ...
