The standards and values, the underlying epistemology of general edu-
cation linked American norms and values back to a European past and
projected it, in turn onto a global stage with a solon, like FDR, or an atomic
Pericles, like JFK, as their embodiments. It is not surprising that, while the
subject of this education is the nation, its object is the world. This last great
agent of this Western projection is "America" -- but not just any America.
It is an America that takes over and, at the same time, is tied to European
ideals -- an America that fuses an evolutionary ideal of progress with
foundational norms of Beauty and Truth. It is the product of a tense and
highly problematic modernist fusion of technological progressivism and
neoclassicism.

-- Michael Geyer¹

The debate over monoculturalism and multiculturalism is not new,
although these terms have taken on a distinctive and peculiar hue of
meaning in the later twentieth century. Their effective history was
intermingled from the start with the political, social and economic
conditions that led to the development of the modern nation-state, with
the history of European racism, white supremacism and colonization.
Their prehistory is tied up with the perceptions of the first European
explorers and missionaries who "discovered" the New World and the
worldview and cultural heritage of the European settlers who followed.
The early statement of the ensuing debate is recorded in eighteenth-
century European parliamentary and public debates over first contact
with indigenous peoples, the civilizing mission of the West, problems of
land purchase and the appropriate means of colonial government.

The oppositional force of multiculturalism as an idea received part
of its historical impetus first from local indigenous struggles; from the
concept of "negritude" and the combined influence of philosophies of

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