Educating to Value Diversity

We hear a great deal about valuing diversity, but much of our education both in school and through the media contradicts and undermines this. You can use materials in this section, adapted from Riane Eisler's book Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, to make the current curriculum more representative of the rich diversity of our nation and our world.

Teaching Our Diverse History: African American Examples

Students can start by looking at U.S. history using standard textbooks which tend to emphasize dominator relations while at the same time failing to present the full horror of the dehumanization of blacks, Native Americans, and later also Chinese and other Asian immigrants. They can then be given other resources that emphasize partnership elements and/or provide the missing perspective of groups that have been dominated.

Teaching Our Diverse Stories

Works by American women from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Amy Tan, give students who share their backgrounds a way to find themselves in the stories and they give students who don't share their backgrounds an understanding of both cultural diversity and the underlying humanity we all share.