The Grand Bazaar: Trust, Multicultural Education, and the Education of Teachers

Abstract

Trust is necessary for education. But distrust is a major problem in urban, multiethnic schools. The existing literature on multicultural education, while strong on political, sociological, and economic concerns, devotes little if any attention to the character of the teacher. Teachers whose preparation has not connected ethics and ethnicity may consider resistance theory as simply shrill, and disregard it entirely. The article goes on to suggest that teachers get a highly personalized, balanced liberal and technical preparation from professors intimately familiar with urban k-12 instruction.