Multicultural Education Evolution Of American Universities

In the 1960s, an unprecedented cultural self-awareness quietly rose in the United States. Its object pointed directly to the dominant WASP culture and its hegemonic position. Dashed by this surfy tide, the multicultural education launched vigorously in all levels of universities in the United States. Multicultural education reform, in American higher education emphasizes on identifying the historicity, nationality and relativity of each culture, which has led to a new status of diverse cultures coexistence.The reform occurred on the ground of several causes: The civil rights movement that caused by inequal commitment and realistic circumstances laid its political foundation. The inequal education opportunities and widening gap between the rich and the poor stirred the wishes of the ethnic and the poor students to dwindle the difference. The alienation of higher education spurred new thoughts, new ideas accepted widely in campuses. The influence of dominant culture has gradually tended to be weak forced the multicultural education rising with counter-thinking and criticism.The development of multicultural education has experienced from idea to thought, from thought to movement, from movement to practice, during which it successively underwent rising and falling, the whole process may be said that had a style of its own historical narration which was concentrated on reflecting the value' s evolution of American historical and cultural concepts. From 1960s to 1980s, universities in the United States had become the main battlefields for the new cultures against the old ones. The new cultures researching on the suffering of the neglected communities sprang up. The promulgation and implement of affirmative action, bilingual education law and the disabled education law provided guarantee for the marginal communities to acquire the equal educational opportunity. Multicultural education became a leading tide, which spurred people' s thought turning on a new reasonable leaf. It guided people from pursuing the absolute equality to seeking equality among the difference in a more realistic way; It inducted people from unilateral emphasis on individualism and liberalism to concern about collective duty andcommunity cultures; It transmit people from propagandizing absolute, universal and eternal morals to acknowledge relative, concrete and dynamic values.After the 1990s, the tide of multicultural education was on the ebb. Multicultural education started to be condemned both in speech and writing as: This is a "culture war" of destroying the whole values and its standards; It's no more than a "disaster of civilization"; It shows the post-industrial society retrogressing into a "new tribalism". At the same time, more and more appeal cases were involved with it, whose negative influences were stirred up extensive .attention. As a result, American government took adverse adjustment towards the related policies on multicultural education. The exterior disadvantageous factors strengthened the interior troubles, which forced many people to think whether multicultural education were in a rational scope? Whether the close connection between multicultural education and the "political correct" overturned the predominant principle of academic neutrality? Whether it will lead to the nihilism while it tries to eliminate the discourse hegemony? Whether the rising globalization trend will speed up the ebb of multicultural education? So multicultural education is faced with strong challenges. The higher education brings up again the topic of conformity. But in the 21th century, due to domestic and international intensive situations, multicultural education that emphasizes power assignment and conflict integration is being supported once again.From the development of multicultural education, we can identify its rationalities, which reflects in the following aspects: it analyses the origin of discourse hegemony from the angle of "cultural idea, it displaces the old line form of historical narration into a new central and marginal structur...