To the Editor:
As the Volunteer Coordinator of Dartmouth Community Services at the Tucker Foundation, I would like to resond to Adam Siegel's letter [April 5, ] concerning the Multicultural Project.
First, I want to correct several errors he made in representing the program. The Project's "inherent, long-term agenda" is in fact not to "creat[e] diverse student bodies at the college level." Instead, our mission is to enhance current classroom multicultural curricula.
While we hope that our presence better equips these children to be tolerant of diversity when they encounter it, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of students in this area are white, and the presence of our volunteers is highly unlikely to effect whether or not their college classmates will be anything but the same.
Secondly, Siegel's comment that "I have no doubt that these kids would have a blast taking time out from Math to paint pictures [of poetic images]" further illustrates his ignorance of our project.
In his proposed scenario, the kids would in fact not take time out of math to paint pictures, they'd take time during art or poetry. That is, our visits enhance the classroom curricula, they don't supplant it.
The kids are getting a firm foundation in Math, science, English literature and American history -- that foundation is simply enhanced by inviting a Chinese student to talk about the abacus as a counting tool, or including in a French class students from France, Haiti and Canada who can share regional language differences and dialects.
Finally, his closing argument about affirmative action, in which he "feel[s] safe to assume ... these very same 'multicultural' enthusiasts are avid supporters of affirmative action policies" is a non-sequitur at best.
He mistakenly chides our project for lowering some perceived competitive standard amongst students, then presumes that we'd favor quotas instead.
Our project has nothing to do with quotas or college applications; it simply shores up existent education and, yes, encourages tolerance.
Why Siegel feels that kindergartners get a "solid education" from hearing British and German folktales, but are somehow maimed and thwarted by learning Jewish ones is beyond me.
Why he considers tolerance and understanding to be the exclusive domain of parents also, to me, seems arbitrary and ridiculous.
Regardless, I would ask him to use his sophisticated education to learn more about our Multicultural Project before levying such inaccurate and ignorant charges against it.
