Unity and Diversity in Education

Remember when every classroom had one of these?

"Haven't you got any more diverse books?" The man across the table asked me, casually setting aside a copy of Little Women. He added that book to a pile of other works he had glanced at and apparently judged as worthless, among them Beowulf, Hamlet, and Paradise Lost.

It was a very frustrating moment in my teaching career.

I was talking with this man, who was black, at a special event my school was hosting to advertise our secondary (high school) program. The man was considering enrolling his daughter, which meant she would take my class on English literature. Naturally, I had been eager to really hype up my class, and for the last few minutes I had been enthusiastically explaining all the wonderful things to be learned from studying Shakespeare, Milton, C.S. Lewis, and other classic authors. His comment brought me up short. Apparently, none of the eternal themes addressed in Shakespeare, or the Christian wisdom found in C.S. Lewis, mattered to him. The curriculum wasn't "diverse" (meaning, there were not enough black authors), so he didn't like it. Nothing I said could change his mind, and he left without enrolling his daughter. Let me repeat that in case you missed it: this man was unhappy that a class about the history of English literature featured predominantly white authors. That's like complaining that a sushi restaurant serves too much seafood, or that a classical music station doesn't play rap. It's crazy.

The Benefits of Unity

All the hype around the word "diversity" obscures the fact that unity has benefits of its own. To take a deep dive into ONE idea, one culture, one legacy, can be a tremendously educational experience. Indeed, this is the approach favored by language immersion programs, in which a foreign exchange student is placed, not in a cosmopolitan setting, but in a place where only a single language is spoken. In the same way, immersing oneself in English literature, and grappling with the themes which unify it and make it uniquely English, is an experience well worth having.

I wonder what the man who didn't like my class would have thought if I were teaching a course in Chinese literature? Or French literature? Would he still have been upset that there were no black authors? Hopefully not! In those cases, it's obvious that the chosen literature is unified around a certain cultural heritage, and to include works from outside that heritage would not be helpful or relevant. Does not the same standard apply to English literature?

The Illusion of Equality

Some courses of study exhibit unity over diversity because that's what the subject calls for, as in an English course only teaching English literature. But there is another reason that a given subject might be taught, and taught best, in a way that lacks ethnic diversity. That reason is merit.

Proponents of ethnic diversity are very fond of the word "inclusion." All we want, they say, is for everyone's contributions to a given field to be equally included. So if we're studying literature, we should include English contributions to that field no more that those of African and Chinese and Native American etc.... The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes the various ethnic groups of the world have all made equal contributions to the world, and thus deserve inclusion on the basis of merit. Such an idea sounds very lovely and democratic, but it is completely false. Take a moment and google something like "world's greatest mathematicians." Your results are going to be whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm. It turns out that just about everyone responsible for advancing the mathematical knowledge of humanity, from Euclid to Newton, is of European descent. You might think that's only an accident of history. You might think that's not fair. But whatever you think about it, the fact remains that if you want to study the works of great mathematicians, the works that merit inclusion are those of white people, not those of a diverse group from every ethnic background. As with mathematics, so with literature, music, art and technology. The Western world (meaning mostly Europe and America) has vastly outdone every other culture in its contributions to the overall body of human knowledge. That's not to say Asian and African cultures have contributed nothing. Indeed, when you consider that the Bible came out of the Middle East and North Africa, and consider how dramatically European ethics, law, art, and literature were affected by that single book, it's easy to see how even a single achievement can have far-reaching results. But in the sheer number of such achievements, western culture is unmatched. No other culture has produced the likes of Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, or even Steve Jobs. It is therefore completely justified for a course of study to feature predominantly white, European contributors.

None of this, I repeat, should be taken to mean that other cultures are worthless or incapable of advancing human knowledge like the West has. Every person is made in the image of God and endowed with a rational mind, and that means they have something to contribute. Their ideas, no matter their ethnicity, can change the world just as much as any European's have. But those ideas will have to prove themselves on the basis of merit. The right to be heard must be earned.