Ethnicity

The principle expelled them because he wanted too defend the republican values for the girls as well as for the whole society. Event he church and state were separated in order to uphold those values and the opportunity for integration they represented. I still cannot work out how dividing people and institution would actually create integration. Wouldn't you need everyone to understand all the different cultures, religions and people around you in order to "integrate"?

When South Africa had a racist apartheid regime which existed before Nelson Mandela came to power, it used to be referred to as a "multicultural" society. This puzzles me as I don't understand how a racist apartheid can be known to be so multicultural.

In my point of view, although I did mention before how I am not sure what the term multiculturalism means, I can say for definite that Britain has always been, in one way or another, a "multicultural society". I can say this because throughout my generation, that “ism” word has been mentioned quite a bit. However, it was not used because we have suddenly become more concerned about the opportunities available to Black youth, but because within Islam, there grew a minor but dangerous cult known as the terrorists. Due to this minor cult, every Muslim in Britain has to suffer the terrorist's consequences. A good example would be the issue on Muslim women wearing the hijab. Once there was a terrorist who used the hijab to disguise himself in order to plant a bomb, now every woman in a hijab is under watchful eyes which isn't just intimidating, but also humiliating for those who are religious and live their life according to God's true words written page by page in the holy Quran.

Surely keeping a close watch on one minority is not going to create a multicultural society is it? It definitely doesn't according to me because, these women in a hijab are known as anti-social who does not want to integrate in this society. If they do integrate in this society that means doing everything that is done in the Western culture, but that is just a way of killing multicultural society as there will be one less culture/religion in Britain! However, it does make me wonder whether this will affect many British Asians out there who have integrated themselves into the Western culture. An example can be Madood's study of the second generation conducted in 1997. He found that the second generation likes to think of themselves as British but not entirely culturally and socially.

They were not comfortable with being British more of a title then a legal title, and found it difficult to call themselves "British" because they felt that majority of the White people did not “[…] accept them as British because of their race or cultural background, through hurtful "jokes", harassment, discrimination and violence […]” (Madood 1997a: 330) and tend to find that people denied to class them as British. I think Madood's study demonstrates great complexity in the construction of identity and sources of ethnic identification because, he describes ideal types that are usually found in mixed form.

I think, minority groups in society often have strong family and religious identities. To put them aside in order to further the cause of integration is not going to be easy. It seems like Britain has failed to find a civilized way of talking about our diverse multicultural society. Let us see if they failed on the educational side too.

Education

“Education is seen as a means of instilling the disciplines and values that the workforce and

administrators of society need.” (Abercrombie, N. and Warde, A. 1988: 254)

The educational area is a reproduction ground for highly debatable topics and areas of interest. One of the most controversial is the role of diversity in schools and its effect on the students. There are of course many different types of diversities that could occur within education which include socioeconomic status, culture, gender, and ethnicity and so on. I will be concentrating on race and ethnicity and the influence it has on students and schools.

Education is most probably the most important means by which members of the ethnic minority communities can become more integrated in to the mainstream of White British life. As children go through education they do not only learn to speak English, but also gain qualifications which will allow them to get jobs in Britain and acquire familiarity with broader British cultural practices. This may help them go higher up in the occupational and class hierarchy. However, there are still many children from ethnic minority groups, especially those coming from another country, that face disadvantages in education which then affect their educational achievements.

There are many factors that intervene on particular levels of achievements. However, I think this is because educational achievement is not the product of a single phenomenon but represents an interaction between students and the institutional environment. The kind of institutional factors that may create problems in achievements can relate to teachers, the courses, exams, the teacher-student interaction, the characteristics of a school, the peer groups and so on. It seems to me that educational achievement in general could fall in any of these two categories: educational achievement through institutional variables (school, teachers, courses etc.) or educational achievement through individual variables. I will explain these through two studies, one by Rutter (1979) and the other by Taylor (1976).