Literacy as Multicultural Education

If literacy education is to reject simple assimilation into the dominant, literate culture, and instead include questioning of the oppressive structure of literate society, it should be aimed at the literate majority as well as the illiterate minotity. In terms of grade levels in literacy education, the illiterate minority are the literacy students and the literate majority are called co-learners. In this paper, literacy education is seen as sharing a common basis with multicultural education, which liberates the majority from their prejudices towards the majority. The minority and the majority co-exist in a multicultural society in which learning cultural relativism is related to self-fulfillment. Culture relativism is the attitude of accepting unknown cultures while respecting one\u27s own culture. What is required of co-learners is to be conscious of the formation of such an attitude. If this does not happen, literacy education can is the final analysis be nothing more than assimilation education which brings the minority into the majority culture. In this paper, I have clarified various points which were not obvious in existing research, such as respect for illiteracy as one culture in a multicultural context, the need to view literacy relativistically as one value among many, and the possivility of a third culture emerging from the written culture of the co-learners and the oral culture of the literacy students. Looking at literacy education as a part of multicultural education provides an opportunity for verifying the significance of literacy education