Abstract:

There is a great diversity of opinions concerning the subject of our investigation therefore it’s rather difficult to define “multicultural education” in a couple of words. A phenomenon of “multicultural education” is an invention of the twenty-first century; it appeared in a period of time characterized by the attempts of numerous ethnic groups to identify themselves as separate cultural, ethnic or religious communities that is closely connected with a problem of migration due to local military conflicts, even extensive wars, surge of fatal diseases, economic and political instability. All of the above contribute much to the escalation of migration problem. Millions of people of different ethnic groups and religious faith are forced to flee looking for a better life. This global tendency is being kept for the last decades and will increase. In this case the main global challenge is to implement ‘multicultural educational paradigm”.
The main issue of “multicultural education” is an equality of educational opportunity for any individual without any reference to his/her cultural, national, religious affiliation.
The most important task within the problem under discussion is how to implement multicultural education and make our world multifocused. Having investigated this problem we always keep in mind the major dimensions of multicultural education offered by James. A. Banks: content integration, knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, equity of pedagogy, empowering school culture.
The article presents an investigation of equality of educational opportunity for different ethnic groups and methodology of multicultural educational system implementation in the frame of globalization. It discusses measures to be taken to develop a democratic idea of multicultural education open for any individual. It also mentions the problems of national, ethnic identification, cultural differences and ways of racial and cultural conflicts prevention within multicultural educational paradigm and democratic ideals it propogates.

Keywords:

Multicultural education, globalization, ethnic group, educational opportunity, interethnic relations.