VANESSA ALLEN-BROWN, PAMELA TWYMAN HOFF, & FAWZEYAH ALAWADHI

THE DECULTURALIZATION OF HISSUH AND HER CHILDREN

The Portrait of a Muslim Mother’s Struggle to Participate in the Education Decision-Making of her Children in American Schools

INTRODUCTION Theories and ideologies that characterize the objectives of American schooling shift from conservative views to liberal views and varying degrees in between. Yet, the basic ideology of modern schooling in America is reminiscent of the 19th century common school movement. Early school reformers believed that children from diverse religions, social class, and ethnic backgrounds could be educated together to create a common culture that would reduce social class conflict. The reformers proposed an education plan to assimilate immigrants and acculturate America’s enslaved population, ensuring the stability of Protestant Anglo- American culture. Advocates of the common school movement believed that intentionally structured schools could prevent social ills like crime and poverty, while providing equal opportunity for upward mobility. Current school reformers, like their predecessors, advocate for a system of schooling designed to eradicate social problems and create a common culture amidst challenges of a pluralistic society. They too perceive education and schooling as a panacea for social, economic, and political concerns and developed similar programs as the common school to acculturate recent immigrants. Uniformity and conformity are certainly two critical features of a common culture; however, its most insidious feature is its ability to define and dictate processes, by which people participate in the creation and re-creation of meaning and values (Apple, 1990). The act of creating a common culture is reliant upon the everyday ways of knowing and understanding one’s self and the world. Education and schooling in America have been critical sites in the creation and transmittal of the dominate group’s ethos and value system (Apple, 1990, Sleeter, 2010, Spring, 2010). Immigrants who were visibly identified as the “other” were expected to deculturalize in order to be successful in American schools and society in general. Deculturalization is a historically evolving process predicated on the concepts of neutrality, justice and stability (Apple, 1990, Spring, 2010). As a pervasive concept it is situated on the level of legitimate knowledge that informs our everyday ways of knowing. In education, the process of deculturalization is substantiated in epistemological, pedagogical and curricula approaches which serve two hegemonic purposes. Firstly, it legitimizes and institutionalizes the cultural

David A. Urias (ed.), The Immigration & Education Nexus, 253–273. © 2012 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. VANESSA ALLEN-BROWN, PAMELA TWYMAN HOFF, AND FAWZEYAH ALAWADHI authority and power of the dominate group. Secondly, it works as a mechanism of control wherein subjugated cultural groups are seduced to internalize the dominate group’s cultural ways of knowing as right and normal. For the group identified as “other” deculturalization is cultural genocide, since they must reject their group’s cultural values and replace them with the dominate group’s values (Spring, 2010). For the dominate group deculturalization normalizes their hegemonic authority thereby ensuring their continued power. The social justice work of civil rights activists and scholars made transparent the dialectical nature of deculturalization and challenged its democratic utility in a culturally pluralistic society. However, the most pervasive aspect of deculturalization as a hegemonic process is its ability to prevail on lived experiences. As Apple (1990) plainly states, …hegemony acts to ‘saturate’ our very consciousness, so that the educational, economic and social world we see and interact with, and the commonsense interpretations we put on it, becomes the world tout court, the only world. Hence, hegemony refers not to congeries of meanings that reside at an abstract level somewhere at the ‘roof of our brain.’ Rather, it refers to an organized assemblage of meanings and practices, the central, effective and dominant system of meanings, values and actions which are lived (p. 5). The modern American populace appears on the one hand to advocate for a multicultural society, one that celebrates diversity and cultural pluralism. Yet, in the wake of conflict, many American reformers align ideologically with principles and convictions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cubberly (1934), for example, argued during the early 20th century that schools need Americanization programs for the large number of immigrants entering the country with various languages and religious affiliations. He believed that schools should “…assimilate the foreign-born [so] that they come to have our conceptions of law and order and come to act in harmony with the spirit and purpose of our American national ideal” (pp. 448–449). These archaic ways of thinking were observable in the wake of September 11th with the vilification of Islam and the hyper-suspicion and surveillance of immigrants. The implications drawn from public discourse is that immigrants, Muslims, in particular must disregard their own cultural identities in alignment with the dominate culture. Advanced by deculturalization rhetoric, the current speculations are reminiscence of early America’s immigrations laws and assimilation programs in schools. Schools are often described as a microcosm of society, reflecting the social, political and economic values of the culture it embodies. Educators and theorists believe that schools more visibly express these ideals, since “the transmission of culture is the primary task of the educational system of a society” (Ornstein, 2002, 169). American public schools reflect society’s attitudes, beliefs, and values. As a result, society’s ideological conflicts are mirrored in the classroom and communicated among teachers and administration. Though there is a growing body of literature (Waugh, Abu-Laban & Qureshi, 1983 Ahmad & Szpara, 2003; Sabry & Bruna, 2007) that explores the experiences

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