How the twain do meet

Writing about democracy, Walt Whitman said, “It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.” The word “diversity”— or the term “cultural diversity”—also has a history in Virginia that has yet to be enacted or actualized in some meaningful way. Clearly, a relationship between these two pieces of unfinished business exists, a relationship that is neither acknowledged nor discussed often enough in our public discourses. Still, a number of practitioners have reflected on the issue of cultural diversity in the context of the educational enterprise and have found it to be a challenge. This challenge must be approached somewhat gingerly because the histories and the promises of both our democracy and our diversity have yet to be enacted or even fully embraced. We could ask the question, Can democracy reach its full potential without adopting “inclusion” as the norm? Or can the full benefit of a diverse society be realized without attention to issues of equity? In their book The Good Society, Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1991) remind us of John Dewey’s concern that “the great society is impersonal and destroys local communities and cultural differences.” For many organizations and communities desiring to become more inclusive and sensitive to differences, it is the very diversity and pluralism in our society that makes it difficult to conduct meaningful public discussion about a variety of important questions. These difficulties could be significantly reduced, however, if various groups would identify common ground and, despite their differences, conduct meaningful business together. As Bellah et al. state, “[T]he real danger is that America, in the form of the great society, continuously undermines pluralism and diversity, ... subverts bilingualism and biculturalism, [and] ... is an agent of homogenization, not diversity. Our most ... influential cultural institutions, television and mass higher education, have been agents of monoculture rather than seedbeds of diversity.” In applying these observations to Virginia’s educational system, we can ask ourselves several questions. First, why is cultural diversity an important topic for discourses on the teaching and learning process? How does cultural diversity relate to issues of educational reform, educational standards, performance-based assessments, and quality education? An equally Cultural diversity and quality education: