The education philosophy and methodology aiming to replace a dominant cultural paradigm in the classroom with a multiplicity of views reflecting the students' cultural backgrounds.

Multicultural education is essentially an effort to translate a pluralistic world view into educational practices and theories. Thus, a multicultural curriculum, unlike traditional programs, strives to present more than one perspective of a historical event or a cultural phenomenon. For example, Christopher Columbus's expedition to America, defined as "discovery" in traditional textbooks with a Eurocentric bias, appears in a different light to the "discovered" populations. Responding to criticism that pluralism in education may impoverish the current curriculum, multiculturalists have argued that multicultural education actually enriches the curriculum. James A. Banks writes: "Rather than excluding Western civilization from the curriculum, multiculturalists want a more truthful, complex, and diverse version of the West taught in the schools. They want the curriculum...