My pal Emre just sent me links to the following articles on multiculturalism by English Lit prof. Terry Eagleton. Excellent reflexive material. Who are the Canadian thinkers on this topic?
A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life. If this is to include those from different cultural traditions, and if our current society thrives on the exclusion of certain groups, then the culture we are likely to end up with will be nothing like the one we have now. And this is just what will be so valuable about it. [1]
on the role of literature
It was left to migrants (Naipaul, Rushdie, Sebald, Stoppard) to write some of our most innovative literature for us, as the Irish had earlier done. But migrants, as the work of VS Naipaul and Tom Stoppard testifies, are often more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of their place of refuge. The same had been true of Joseph Conrad, Henry James and TS Eliot. Wilde, typically perverse, challenged and conformed at the same time.
The great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended. Rushdie’s was one of the few voices to keep alive this radical legacy; but now, with his fondness for the Pentagon’s politics, we need to look elsewhere for a serious satirist.
There are a number of factors in such renegacy. Money, adulation and that creeping conservatism known as growing old play a part, as does the apparent collapse of an alternative to capitalism. Most British writers welcome migrants, dislike Tony Blair, and object to the war in Iraq. But scarcely a single major poet or novelist is willing to look beyond such issues to the global capitalism that underlies them. Instead, it is assumed that there is a natural link between literature and left-liberalism. One glance at the great names of English literature is enough to disprove this prejudice. [2]
I had a conversation with M & R about multiculturalism in Canada last week, sparked by the topic of funding private religious schools of which i am opposed and which is being discussed as part of the Ontario Elections by the Tories. I would however support a great class in the public schools about world religion. If it is more spiritualism we want and need and more culture, i am not convinced that religion, its doctrines, structures, dogmas and exclusion are the way to go. My pal S who is a born again Evangelical Christian is quite concerned about accountability. She sees exhibited in her church some very unpluralistic behaviour and a complete lack of reflexive and critical thinking about curricula and a bunch of knee jerk reactionism pushing toward seperation and control as opposed to pedagogy, learning and healthy debate. In S’s mind, there will be little accountability in religious schools, and of course lets recall the contemporary debacles of reform schools, residential schools, and Anglican school abuses to name a few. Something else is required, i am not sure what, but i am not convinced that religious seperation brings tolerance, universalism, pluralism and multiculturalism, it may instead bring more particularism, seperation, division and exclusion.
I would however also support more funding for public schools in general and remove funding from catholic schools. I believe pluralism is gained by intereacting with each other, not by seperating rich kids from poor kids as we do now with the private school systems, and not by seperating religious kids from secular kids which almost translates to rich and poor kids but less flagrantly than the secular private schools do. The more we mix and communicate the more we learn. Also, imagine if we could get the class size ratio of the private schools, the focus on humanities, the attentive psychologist, the language resources and so on and the awesome international ski trips into the regular public school system! Youzee! that would nip the mediocrity we have in our current public school system in the butt!
Unfortunately schools are a reflection of their cathment area boundaries, and let me tell you there are some very fancy social engineering projects at play in Ottawa where schools like Elmdale and Hopewell Avenue Public School somehow manage to be almost uniformly white and wealthy while McNaab and St-Anthony’s remain very multicultural and stressed with a lack of ESL in the classroom and almost no white kids. Hmmm! Not quite redlining but geographic proximity, renting vs owning, neighbourhood profiles, income, class and so on are at play in determining which kid goes to which school and who get to hang with who. I wonder if we should be shifting some school boundaries a little once we remove funding from the catholic schools? Then perhaps we can get a bit more of a balanced representation of the population in the schools and a bit more interacting. It is not really race or ethnicity that is the issue here but class and income that seperates our kids more than anything! And well, there is the desire for a better quality of education.
Having made the choice myself to get the kids to good schools took some magic wielding, i do not live in a fine hood, i rent, have not a great income, am a sole support parent and have a million jobs that keep me really busy but i do have a great education, am worldly and think in terms of systems and the long term, but have the inability due to time and money restrictions to invest time in this system in the short term. So I chose special programs like the Alternative School system and Middle French Immersion system. The rascals managed to get to the good schools in the good hoods with all the upper middle class parents who bring grandma to parent teacher meetings. Why that choice? Well, even though i could not afford private school, i was not going to have them in a school where 95% of the kids do not speak English and the teacher was stressed out with imparting the basics of language along with all the adjustments required for integrating kids from 60 different countries (refugees, economic migrants, war torn trauma, dad owns the local vietnamese pho shop and brought the whole family over, and so on) because then they would never get the academic basics while they would be exposed to a wonderful cross section of representatives from all over the world, great but at the expense of academics. The kids are also in the schools of the hostile education Harris Tory Regime cuts, not pretty! Instead they got all the good touchy feely high density multicultural education in the Alternative school, then all the elite academic programming of the Middle French immersion program that few choose but which has the greatest success rate. They also still have friends from all over the world, their best friends remaining the kids they went to daycare with and that was the most multicultural environment of all. Each religious holiday was marked and celebrated, parents would come in with special foods to share and talk about what they were celebrating! All that from the day they were babies till the age of 10! Now that is what pluralism and multiculturalism is! That only happened because of a healthy mix of both subsidized and full fee paying kids interacting together. Parents were members, and in the end kids from all classes, races, backgrounds, religions befriended each other! No parent in their right mind would stop jacques from spending time with mohamed and nial and josh and aram and felipe and shaneae! The daycare also transcended geography. It was not a cathcment area issue. The kids went to the daycare when a spot was free so they travelled all sorts of distances to get there again ensuring mixing. Now that is what a pluralistic multiculral democratic society is based on! Ain’t it?
