Multicultural Society and Social Values

Rohmat Mulyana

1. Culture and Values

Culture is a set of rules, expectation, and beliefs that a group of people live by (LaMachia, 2000). A culture influences the people appearance, language, values, traditions, customs, food, clothing, and music. A culture also may be based around a religion. As Curry (2005) noted religion played important role in society. Therefore, the advocator of religious culture believes that religion is one of important elements of culture formation and uniqueness.

In a culture there is community spirit that is called by Dean (2003) as spiritual culture. He remarked that the spiritual culture provides the vision for the country, just as a spiritual faith provides the vision for person. Often this spirit occurs in a grouping of society that consists of people who share a common culture, obey the same political authority, and occupy given territory. Therefore, Kluckhohn (1961) has noted that human behavior is dominated by culture in the sense that the greater part, perhaps all, of the variation between societies is based on differences in cultural experience.

Cultures perform in various kinds their characteristics according to their identities. When many kinds of culture are expressed in a country, it can make the nation of the country become more multicultural. In this case, what Curry says about culture relativism, will be occurred in the country. As noted by Curry (2005) cultural relativism is the belief that each culture is unique and must be analyzed and judge on its own term. That actually occurred in the so-called multicultural society where people appear different language, values, traditions, customs, food, clothing, and music, artifacts, etc.

Cunningham (2003) regards the multicultural as the most disturbing trends today. He said that the major issues must be addressed in; first, race and ethnicity are only two of the many identity factors that contribute to our world view. Some others are gender, socioeconomic status, level of acculturation to majority norms, geographic region of origin, level of mobility (both physical and geographic), sexual orientation, educational achievement, speech patterns, family structure, religious beliefs, age cohort, health status, and various types of life experience. Second, recognized ethnic groups in the United States are rarely -- if ever -- homogenous, and in-group distinctiveness may be as prominent as differences between groups. Third, ethnic identity is not restricted to minority groups; majority-group members also have ethnicity.

According to the aspect above, it can be concluded that multicultural society means a community which involves several distinct racial or religious cultures. In the society, the people respect to the ways of all racial or religious culture, not just one's own.

In multicultural society, there are some social values that influence on life style, social conduct, community interaction, or even philosophy of life of each cultural member. These values are the preferences people share about what is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or undesirable (Curry 2005). Like attitude and beliefs, values are learned from the group of culture in which individual is socialized. Banks (1991) noted that human beings are not born with a set of values and do not derive them independently.

Regarding the social values Posner (2005) listed at least 200 social values are commonly performed in social life. Among of them are tolerance, cooperation, diversity, justice, patriotism, respect, wisdom, harmony, courtesy, etc. Often these values are shared by member of community not in the same quality of property. For example, in a community of life the actualization of tolerance maybe better than justice, or patriotism are higher appreciated than respect to others. To clarify the position of values actualization in actual life, Mark (2005), therefore, noticed the importance of learning social science that can help to explain the value claimed or articulated by particular groups.

2. Need for Multicultural Education

As sub system of society and melting-pot of culture, education, in particularly school education, takes important role in transmitting living values. The role will be more significant when a school is located in a place where various people live in different culture like in US and in some others multicultural countries. One of the important efforts need to be taken place by school therefore is multicultural education for their children. But in matter of fact, as noted by Adams (1997) this cultural diversity is frequently ignored by educational institutions. It seems need to be deserved to open recognition in other enhancing student’s worldview on values, traditions, and practices that differ from their own culture.

According to Banks (1991) there are three major factors makes multicultural education become necessity of a school. First, ethnic pluralism is a growing societal reality that influences the lives of young people. Second, in one way or another, individuals acquire knowledge or beliefs, sometimes invalid, about ethnic and cultural groups; and third, beliefs and knowledge about ethnic and cultural groups limit the perspectives of many and make a difference, often a negative difference, in the opportunities and options available to members of ethnic and cultural groups. These major factors, in turn, can be a systematic variation in the realm of cultural phenomena.

Because of this, learning ethnicity, race, and class are important in the lives of many citizens of the United States. All members of society are expected to develop multicultural education based on understanding of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups and their significance in US society and throughout the world. Schools cannot afford to ignore their responsibility to contribute to the development of multicultural education. Only a well-conceived, sensitive, thorough, and continuous program of multicultural education can create the broadly based multicultural literacy for the future of the nation and world.

Applying multicultural education in school, students also can be led to close the gap between democratic ideals and societal practices. As granted by US constitution, every individual and group has freedom to speak, and to express culture and belief system. But, as pointed out by Banks (1991) such practices of democratic ideals are sometimes in discriminatory toward members of ethnic and cultural groups. This is actually emphasized again the important of articulating shared values (Esposito, 200; Kidder, 2006), universal values (Kidder, 2006), ultimate values (Rothman, 1977), and moral universality (Dean, 2003) of diversity of culture and stress the important of respect toward differences.

The effort of multicultural education can be well taken place within an educational setting that accepts, encourages, and respects the expression of ethnic and cultural diversity. To attain this kind of educational atmosphere, the total school environment -- not merely clasroom courses and lessons -- must be reformed. Schools' informal or "hidden" curricula (Kay, 1975) are as important as their formalized courses of study.

Reference

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