Demographics

According a press release from the US Census Bureau, found at http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/012496.html, minorities will be the majority by 2042. Here is what the rest of the article has to say:

"By 2050, the minority population — everyone except for non-Hispanic, single-race whites — is projected to be 235.7 million out of a total U.S. population of 439 million. The nation is projected to reach the 400 million population milestone in 2039."
The non-Hispanic white race population, is decreasing, while the Hispanic population is projected to nearly triple between 2008-2050 period. Its share of the nation’s total population is projected to double, from 15 percent to 30 percent. Thus, nearly one in three U.S. residents would be Hispanic.
The black population is projected to increase from 14 percent of the population in 2008, to 15 percent in 2050.
The Asian population is projected to climb from 5.1 percent to 9.2 percent.
"Among the remaining race groups, American Indians and Alaska Natives are projected to rise from 4.9 million to 8.6 million (or from 1.6 to 2 percent of the total population). The Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population is expected to more than double, from 1.1 million to 2.6 million. The number of people who identify themselves as being of two or more races is projected to more than triple, from 5.2 million to 16.2 million."

Moreover, "in 2050, the nation’s population of children is expected to be 62 percent minority, up from 44 percent today. Thirty-nine percent are projected to be Hispanic (up from 22 percent in 2008), and 38 percent are projected to be single-race, non-Hispanic white (down from 56 percent in 2008). "

Based on these projections, it simply doesn't make sense that we would continue in our traditional eurocentric path of education. This does not mean eliminating European or white literature and history from courses, but rather reframing the focus of education and teaching from multiple perspectives.

To provide some examples of how ingrained eurocentrism is in U.S. education, I want to provide some examples. As an English major with a concentration in world literature, I should be reading literature from all over the world. But:

In my Religion and Literature class, we only read books on Christianity and Judaism.
In my Comparative Literature class, the only books we have read so far this semester are three on the Holocaust.

Women's Fiction: Jane Eyre by Bronte, The Bell Jar by Plath, The Awakening by Kate Chopin. We did read, however: Quicksand by Larson, and Shange's For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf (African American lit); The Autobiography of my Mother by Kincaid (Caribbean lit); Kingston's The Woman Warrior (Asian American lit), and Persepolis by Satrapi (Iranian lit). This does show an attempt to diversify the curriculum, and that is appreciated. However, where on this syllabus is literature from Latin American writers? Some examples of authors to be considered are Allende, Cisneros, and Alvarez. But again, Latin American voices are continually silenced and/or forgotten, which is particularly disconcerting considering the changing demographics of the U.S. and the growing number of Latinos/as.

I have been forced to take an Early British lit class and an Early American lit class- these are requirements for every English major. One course in alternative canons is required, but the overwhelming majority of literature chosen is from the eurocentric perspective.

Defining of Terms

Zarefsky in his keynote address on Definitions argues that "the ways in which we define our terms affects the way we think, talk, and act about the realities for which they stand" (4). Thus, in order to clarify my argument against eurocentrism in education, I would like to define the term.

Eurocentrism: being centered on Europe or Europeans. Most courses in grade schools and high schools are taught from eurocentric perspectives, especially history and literature courses. For example, most books read in high schools are written by dead white male authors.

Eurocentrism makes it particularly difficult for non-European American (non-white) students to identify with what they are learning in school, and fails to provide these students with a voice. This is a major problem in U.S. education today.

Alternative Canons

I found an interesting article on canons in education:

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=2&hid=6&sid=55bc6ac2-b036-4b8c-af0a-5562c3533111%40sessionmgr2

This article by Amin Alhassan questions how some questions are made central in education, particularly in field of communication studies, while others are placed in the margins. Though focusing on schools in Canada, I believe that the arguments still apply to U.S. education. Alhassan argues that though there has been an increase in alternative canons courses, they are always offered as electives, not as required courses: "The unstated assumption is that feminism, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory are optional to the field, rather than integral, or are offered only intermittently. This raises the question, then, of what gets valorized as part of the core curriculum of communication and culture studies, and what gets reduced to a niche option" (pg 104). Therefore, these classes are still seen as de-central, as less important than eurocentric ideologies, and thus the relations of power are sustained.

Power relations

Zarefsky, in the article, "Argumentation in the Tradition of Speech Communication Studies" that "Power enables those who hold it to impose a partial perspective as if it were holistic," which he calls "hegemony." These partial perspectives become so normalized in society that they seem obvious, commonsensical, even natural. They become ideologies. In the U.S., we have a European understanding of history, because European Americans maintain the power. Through our education system, the hegemonic ideals that European knowledge is the only knowledge is repeated and recreated over and over again. For instance, all teachers are expected to have a knowledge of European histories. English teachers are expected to know all of the European writers, the canonical literature. However, they are not expected to know any other writers from any other area of the world (excepting the token piece of African, Asian or Caribbean literature often found on syllabi). Yet my professor for Latin American literature, for example, is expected to know not only Latin American literature, but American and European as well. And while classes in Latin American literature are offered at JMU, one would be hard pressed to find a book by a Latin American author on any other syllabi, as I know from my experiences as an English major. For some reason, this area of the world is unimportant. Perhaps by teaching alternative canons, hegemony is threatened. Therefore, U.S. education is overwhelmingly eurocentric as a means to uphold the power of white European Americans in the United States.