Peripheral Visions

cause for increasing concern, but the whole notion of homogeneity is questionable. Schools are often modeled on factories, putting children through a production line designed to turn out a uniform product, and we are surprised to find that even so we keep turning out deviants and illiterates—and a few original thinkers. We are increasingly inclined to limit hospitality to newcomers, easily seen as simple or wicked when they fail to conform, or perhaps as undermining the commonality needed for a functioning society.
    Does anyone remember Gladly, the cross-eyed bear? She is surely the totem of all children who have sat through adult occasions with only the most partial understanding of the enigmatic behavior of their elders, in this case a Protestant service, the adults singing together, “Gladly the cross I’d bear.” We assume that the adults do know what they are saying, more or less, and the children will work it out by the time they are grown up. But grown-ups do not share a complete and unified understanding of the culture of their community. They can participate without doing so, continuing to learn in the process. This is especially true in complex, diverse, and rapidly changing societies, but I believe we have underestimated the extent to which it is true of all human societies. I grew up attending the Episcopal church, sharply aware that under the solemnity of common ceremonial utterances, there was a cacophony—no, a complex polyphony—of diverse belief and understanding. The most beautiful rituals were joint performances sustained by participants with disparate codes. “Jose, can you see” is not a bad anthem for a society of many races and peoples, sung with fervor by thousands who are by no means all Hispanic. Full understanding is not a necessity for participation.
    In point of fact, the debate about “multiculturalism” is a good example of an interaction in which the participants do not share the same system of meanings. The term itself is flagged for trouble, like most terms ending in the suffix - ism , immediately identifiable as a matter of contention. No word ending in - ism should be used to refer to the simple fact that the United States is increasingly a society of many races and peoples: motley, dappled, diverse. All that has been said here about communication across difference and the kinds of creativity and insight it can stimulate applies in the United States—as it does in London or Paris or Tel Aviv.
    The debate becomes political when questions of policy arise: whether to slow diversification or put a damper on its expression, whether and how to support it. The term multiculturalism is used to refer to at least two different but complementary educational strategies: one that supports individuals in their own ethnic or racial identities, and one that enhances everyone’s capacity to adapt by offering exposure to a variety of other traditions.
    I grew up with large doses of Mother Goose, the Five Little Peppers, and Shakespeare, and smaller doses of Balinese music and Russian folktales and the Arabian Nights. By the time I was sixteen I was ready to reverse the proportions, for the mix had somehow made me ready to immerse myself in Hebrew literature and then to move on to Arabic and Persian and Pilipino. When I met my husband I had to look Armenia up in an encyclopedia, but acquiring new skills and information to support the transition from cultural distance to marriage seemed natural. I come from a privileged sector of American society whose identity is affirmed on all sides: at home, in the classroom, and through the media. I was luckier than many WASPs, however, in my early exposures to other traditions, for the privileged are often culture bound, open to only one. Complacency works against curiosity. Minority children, swamped by iterations of Western European traditions they do not identify with, are a lot more canny about the ways of whites than vice versa; street smarts depend on vision at the periphery. Exposure to difference encourages breadth of attention, a way of seeing that underlies ways of continuing to learn as an adult, for every opening to different cultural traditions is a rehearsal for dealing constructively with inner or outer change, adapting to the computer revolution or to one’s own aging.
    Confidence depends on identity; adaptive insight depends on difference. Efforts to support either through education are referred to as “multiculturalism,” which