Verbalizing Diversity in an Educational Environment

Many Western, immigration-centered societies, from the US and the UK to Australia and Canada, claim to value diversity steeped in equality. Laws are in place to mandate the equal treatment of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in the workplace and everyday life, often enforced with a strong social taboo against visible, public, and blatant displays of discriminatory behavior against people of different sociocultural backgrounds. Of course, plenty of discriminatory incidents, some of which are well-known and questionable, occur in these countries, but there is a broad consensus at the grassroots level that discrimination is undesirable.

Part of how the anti-discriminatory consensus came about in these countries relates to the educational system. Elite universities in these countries are well-known for their student and staff bodies made up of intakes from around the world. The Harvard brand name, for instance, is valued just as much in other countries as in the US, leading to the university securing the best people from every country. The resulting diversity in the geographical origins of students and professors provides their peers with a concrete belief that excellence can be had no matter the background. 

That diversity in higher education trickles down to the primary and secondary school levels in these countries. Because schools like Harvard produce graduates and alumni of diverse sociocultural backgrounds, their children also tend to be culturally and ethnically diverse. If their parents remain in the same countries that they were educated in, these students bring their comfort with handling people of different backgrounds to their schools from an early age. The clustering of diversity around elite universities quickly becomes one that is multi-generational and not limited to those directly to the universities.

Therefore, whether or not they like the situation, many people in these Western, immigration-centered societies already take the diversity of their co-workers, classmates, and neighbors, especially at the highly educated, high-income level, for granted. For youths growing up near major universities, multinational corporations, and other magnets of international arrivals, they can make friends from different backgrounds and learn about other cultures and ways of thinking simply through day-to-day interactions. Having differences with peers is seen as a matter of fact, not insurmountable obstacles or sources of tension.

Yet, because diversity has become so matter-of-fact for those growing up in it, there is a growing gap between them and those from monocultural backgrounds. The latter, usually from countries where social groups are exclusive, strictly defined, and devoid of both internal and external diversity in either sociocultural background or ways of thinking, struggle to think outside a binary "us vs. them" manner when suddenly thrust into environments with many people that do not share their upbringing. The resulting inability to communicate smoothly with those from other backgrounds put the "monoculturals" at a disadvantage against those used to diversity from a young age.

That disadvantage becomes particularly apparent when those from monocultural backgrounds suddenly move into elite schools characterized by diversity. Even if they excel academically, they might find much to be amiss outside the classroom. It is bad enough that they are far away from their usual social support circles in the form of family and friends back home, now they cannot easily find alternatives among peers who they struggle to communicate with beyond the narrow language of academic cooperation. The beliefs and values that separate them from their peers may socially derail the monoculturals no matter how excellent they are in class.

Unfortunately, educational institutions, at all levels and even in multicultural environments, struggle to educate students on how to handle diversity on an everyday basis. While it is true that people in many parts of Western, immigration-centered societies take the presence of many different minorities for granted, standardized school curriculums rarely reflect the diversity of their learners. The result is that the more monocultural parts of these multicultural states lash out against the immigrant realities of their homelands. 

Amending the shortfall of teaching related to diversity requires a fundamental rethink of what education really is for. In the quest to ram as much practical knowledge as possible into the heads of students, many schools have forgotten that it is often people relationships, rather than hard skills, that make or break team collaborations to get work done. Teaching the soft skills of handling adversity, in practical and concrete terms, such as what topics to avoid in conversations, how to reduce misunderstandings, and how to cope with cultural differences, need to be considered as integral parts of what students, from all backgrounds, ought to learn from a young age.