Probably the best known account of how cultural values different from those of the school have affected performance evaluation, success, failure and perceptions of competence is work done among the Navajo and the schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Navajo value a democratic harmony. To be different from a norm is to be deviant and by definition to fail on this important standard. Teachers, however, judge achievement purely in terms of success on school tasks, and distribute rewards differentially on that basis. The literature describes an incident in which a student who achieved an "A" on a test in which "C" was the norm was praised in front of the class as an example to be emulated. The "successful" child, however, was filled with embarrassment and shame at being so exposed as different from his peers. He could be expected to take care not to "fail" in this way again.
The thrust of anthropological literature has been to demonstrate that different cultures allocate values differently and that these values have consequences for behavior. This literature has gone well beyond simplistic assertions that culture A is different from culture B. Anthropologists have been able to account for value differences by examining child raising practices, family, political, and economic organizations. Value systems, then, are deeply embedded within a cultural matrix and more difficult to change in an acculturation situation than knowledge or belief systems. Therefore, the way the values of a particular cultural group lead them to evaluate tasks expected of their children in schools may lead to serious and pervasive conflict when schools are run by and attentive to the values of a different culture.
There is evidence from research to support a lack of responsiveness on the part of schools to the values of the children they serve. Wax (1967), examining high school dropouts from the Pine Ridge Sioux schools, documents the dissimilarity between the values of the Sioux culture and that of the middle class, white oriented schools. Fuchs and Havighurst (1972) point to the insubstantial Indian influence on curriculum design and content in schools for Indians and the predominance of non-Indian personnel in these schools. Judgments of success or excellence by school personnel may be at variance with judgments produced by a particular ethnic group. Indeed, what the school values as an objective may not be so perceived by a particular group being served, and what a particular group defines as a goal may seem inappropriate to the school. For example, many schools are setting up bilingual education programs in response to the obvious perceived needs of many Spanish speaking students. However U.S. born blacks object to the diversion of funds from their children, and "middle class" Puerto Rican parents object to their children being taught to read in Spanish because this will prevent them from getting "white" (English speaking) jobs.
Conversely, other Spanish parents are actively concerned with maintaining their own ethnic identities with their linguistic heritage and want their children to read and write adequately in Spanish. At the same time, in more traditional schools there are no bilingual programs; even schools having 60 percent Spanish speaking children can have less than 1 per cent staff who even speak Spanish. These schools clearly only value learning to read and write in English, and judgments of competence are often made solely on this criterion. In such a setting a student's ability to learn, no matter how well he can read or write Spanish, is evaluated solely by his scores on English reading tests.
These examples emphasize the contradictions that can exist between school goals and the goals of the ethnic groups which make up the school population. While the findings from psychology consistently suggest that competence on a particular task is rewarding, the anthropological literature would suggest that competence in a task valued by one's culture is more rewarding than competence in a task not valued by one's culture, and that failure at a task valued by one's culture is more costly than failure at a task not valued by one's own culture.
Cultural Pluralism
In this paper we have been building to an argument for a greater orientation in schools to the cultural pluralism of the peoples they serve. Cultural pluralism is a cultural diversity. It refers to differences brought about by group norms, resulting in different behavioral styles among various ethnic and linguistic groups. Group identity is nourished; attempts to minimize group differences and achieve melting pot models are eschewed. Sanday (1973) has recently distinguished cultural pluralism from structural pluralism. It is an important differentiation. Structural pluralism is the differential incorporation (or stratification) of various population categories into the opportunity structure of the society. It prevents some groups from achieving the social and economic status which others are able to achieve; racism is an example of structural pluralism. One can talk about maintaining cultural differences and, at the same time, providing the learning experiences required to successfully compete for resources. Presumably this prevents cultural pluralism from becoming structural pluralism. But is this in fact true or possible in a society so used to differentially incorporating race and sex and nationality populations in its opportunity structure?
Ethnic differentiation is clearly the most basic form of cultural pluralism. When ethnicity corresponds to racial divisions, however, the more structural forms of pluralism emerge. Examples are not difficult to come by to suggest that in many societies, including our own, racial identification has been important and necessary to support an exploitative, subordinating relationship (for example, slavery and colonialism). Exploitation and subordination need not be aspects of cultural pluralism, but because of its context in our own de facto economically stratified society, is a completely benign cultural pluralism really possible?
Educators must be aware that schools form only a part of a child's life. The education of American minority group children takes place within the context of the way in which our society is actually stratified. For example, Ogbu (1974) argues that black and Mexican American students reduce their efforts in school tasks to the level of rewards they expect as future adults. We must ask what differences in children we can reasonably expect through our educational innovations, given the everyday reality of growing up in an economically discriminated segment of the population. This is especially important in evaluating what we do. For example, we must not judge the effects of school integration too quickly when there is so much that remains segregated in our lives.
Yet schools must do a better job, must not turn or help turn cultural pluralism into structural pluralism. Our directives point in the following ways. We need to increase the diversity of educational environments to increase the likelihood of children finding one within which they can function. We need to increase the number and diversity of educational outcomes sought for assessment and the procedures for measuring them. We need to nurture the legitimacy of multiple educational outcomes that foster cultural pluralism without reinforcing structural pluralism. We must insist on curriculum definitions that allow the examination of what goes on in school as part of a larger context the rest of the child's life.
