Multiculturalism Perspectives: The Quest for Balancing Ethiopian Indigenous Knowledge and Western Knowledge

Abstract

Modern education is the key to ensure well-rounded development in any nation. This, in turn, implies the need to review and analyze its historical development in order to improve its relevance to the society under consideration. Likewise, this paper investigated the historical development of Ethiopian modern secular education from the perspective of multicultural education using Banks (1995, 2006, 2014) five basic dimensions of multicultural education as conceptual frameworks. To this end, data were gathered from primary and secondary sources that dwell on modern secular education of Ethiopia under four regimes: Menelik II’s regime, Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime, Dergue’s regime, and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s regime. The data were analyzed using a discursive qualitative approach. The study revealed that although modern secular education had been introduced to Ethiopia since1908, the multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural nature of the country has been hardly reflected in the education system of the country until recently. In addition, results of the study unveiled the fact that there has been no attempt of balancing the Ethiopian diverse indigenous knowledge and the western knowledge in the education system of the country. Implications that are assumed to enhance the incorporation and practices of issues of the Ethiopian diverse indigenous knowledge such as traditional appeasement, mediation, arbitration, negotiation, tenacity, settlement, exclusion of the criminal person from societal affairs, and the likes with the western knowledge in a balanced manner are forwarded in the paper.