Importance Of Multiculturalism In Schools

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, culture is defined as the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. In other words, culture is the action and the norms carried out by a specific group of people. These norms have to be agreed on by all members of the group, or the majority of them. Some of them might not agree on some matter but in order to be accepted in the society, they will eventually respect the majority’s vote.
Meanwhile, multiculturalism is the practice of giving equal attention to many different backgrounds in a particular setting. Clara M. Chu (2005) agreed that multiculturalism is the co-existence of diverse cultures, where culture includes racial, religious, or cultural …show more content…
He insisted that most of the school he had been to paid little attention to promoting unity in real life situation because they were really no opportunity to do so. He admitted that the teachers in school are obliged to teach unity as moral values or as the topic in the syllabus, however no further programme was conducted because of the demographical constrain. He said that “We instill the values of unity in diversity theoretically to our pupils, but to be honest they could not apply it in their daily lives because we rarely see any Tamils or Chinese here in Besut.” His foremost concern is that they pupils would not be able to adjust themselves in society with different cultural background in the future. He said that the pupils do not show any hatred towards other ethnics, but they did not know how to communicate with pupils from other ethnics whenever in camp or other state-level school activities. This outcome resulted from the poor exposure of the ethnics in Malaysia. In comparison to schools with multicultural pupils, these pupils’ knowledge of other cultures and ethnics in Malaysia are