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Reviewed by:
  • Rightist Multiculturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform, and: Beyond Liberal Democracy in Schools: The Power of Pluralism
  • Vanessa Pérez Rosario (bio)
Rightist Multiculturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform By Kristen Buras (Routledge2008)
Beyond Liberal Democracy in Schools: The Power of Pluralism By Barbara Thayer-Bacon (Teachers College Press2008)

Although multicultural education promised to reach all children and eliminate inequalities in U.S. schools, it has yet to fulfill its promise. And severed from its original connection to socio-political concerns, multiculturalism lost much of its meaning. Two new books enter into the debate over multicultural education and advocate for a contextualized multiculturalism that has the power to challenge socio-economic inequalities. Kristen Buras' Rightist Multiculturalism: Core Lessons on Neoconservative School Reform and Barbara Thayer-Bacon's Beyond Liberal Democracy in Schools: The Power of Pluralism remind us that the transformative mission of multicultural education is still greatly needed in U.S. schools today.

In Rightist Multiculturalism, Kristen Buras offers a history of the Core Knowledge movement and a meticulous critique of E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s educational vision. The question that Buras astutely raises is one that others have raised in the past: whose knowledge is core knowledge? Buras moves us beyond this question by revealing the political frame that Hirsch and supporters of Core Knowledge use when they argue that the choices they make when creating core curricula are guided by nothing but "facts," when claims to knowledge are always subject to dispute, ideology, and interpretation. She examines specifically how the Core Knowledge movement claims to be multicultural as it strips multiculturalism of its democratic, liberatory, and transformative mission. She calls this form of multiculturalism "rightist multiculturalism" and demonstrates that by assuming the language [End Page 37] of multiculturalism, Hirsch and the Core Knowledge movement have stripped multicultural education of its ability to disrupt the status quo and subvert entire political and economic systems.

Buras sheds light on how the Core Knowledge movement and rightist multiculturalism are able to gain such popularity in the United States by downplaying the role of hierarchy and power structures central to the stories of Native Americans, slavery, and immigration in this country. Buras points out that supporters of rightist multiculturalism argue that the violence of slavery and genocide are not appropriate subject matter for young children. However, stripped of its socio-political context, multiculturalism loses its meaning and its power. This brings us to a pedagogical question outside the scope of Buras's book: How do we effectively teach young children about the structural inequalities in our society and offer up models of true democracy? Buras's book is not designed to address this question, but she certainly raises important issues and leaves room for others to seriously consider this problem.

As the work of a professor of philosophy of education, Barbara Thayer Bacon's book is as theoretical as one might expect. Yet her book furthers the conversation and helps us to consider this question. Thayer-Bacon's study, Beyond Liberal Democracy in Schools, first explores the history of liberal democracy and then, based on her observations of schools in different nations, suggests ways to move beyond this philosophy. Examining first the Euro-Western liberal democratic philosophy of Locke and Rousseau, Thayer-Bacon notes that for these philosophers the role of government was to protect the rights of the individual. This understanding of democracy highlights "individual freedom and autonomy" (2) and is based on the assumption "that individuals develop atomistically on their own" (2). Although individualism has come under critique by movements that include radical democracy, multiculturalism, political liberalism, and communitarianism, she argues that liberal democratic theory still greatly influences U.S. schools. In the first section of this book, she discusses the various current philosophical democratic theories beginning with John Dewey, followed by Benjamin Barber, Iris Marion Young, and finally Laclau and Mouffe. Although they attempt to move beyond liberal democracy, she contends, they still cling to it. She argues that although all these theorists add to our understanding of democracy, none of them goes far enough in defining a true democracy. She calls for a new democracy that is not fixed, but rather always in...

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