In order to think clearly about multicultural education, we need to think what it is for a person to grow up and form an identity in a culturally plural society. Official prescriptions for the study of history and social studies give a lot of attention to the multiplicity of cultures in the United States; but they say much less about what that diversity implies for the identities of particular individuals. This is a pity because questions about community and identity are complex and illuminating, and the array of possible answers poses an interesting challenge to our preconceptions about the role of culture in individual lives. Does cultural plurality at the social level imply cultural plurality in the constitution and identity of each individual member of the society? Or does it rather presuppose cultural homogeneity at the individual level, so that even though the society emerges as a patchwork, each constituent person or group is cut from whole cloth? If “[t]he United States is a microcosm of humanity today,” does that make each citizen also a microcosm, so that she reflects in her relationships, aspirations, and experiences a little of each of the country's constitutive cultures? Or is the United States a microcosm in which the integrity of each person's identity is secured by the culture and ethnicity of some group in particular?

The questions are not just about the existing characteristics of a multicultural society; they are also about what a society of this kind should aspire to.