PUBLIC POLICY AND SOCIAL CONFLICT IN MULTICULTURAL SOCIETIES: CASE STUDIES OF THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION IN PHILADELPHIA, 1800-1860, AND MONTREAL, 1960-1981

This study focuses on patterns of social conflict and political accomodation in severely divided multicultural societies. Drawing largely from the insights of consociational analysis, the main argument of the study is that decentralized, community-based forms of political institution design and public policies which maximize ethnocultural group autonomy offer the best strategy for ameliorating culture group conflicts. Policies which ignore minority community sensibilities tend to have disastrous consequences in multicultural societies.; The problem is approached in an historical and comparative fashion, examining educational policy and social conflict in nineteenth century Philadelphia and twentieth century Montreal. Obviously these are very different urban settings representing different types of multicultural systems, different time periods, and different conditions of social, economic, and political development. Nevertheless, these differences enable us to observe--under varying conditions--the consequences of non-consociational educational policies for patterns of ethnocultural group conflict.; After extensively reviewing the literature on public policy in multicultural societies, the dissertation focuses in depth on the policy experiences of Philadelphia and Montreal. In Philadelphia--and at the state level in Pennsylvania--Anglo-Protestant dominance of the emerging institution of public schooling unleashed significant ethnocultural conflicts involving the state's German-language communities and Philadelphia's Irish-Catholic minority. The Germans attempted to resist the perceived anglicizing impact of the common school, while in Philadelphia ethnoreligious cleavages crystallized over the issue of Bible readings in the city's rapidly expanding public schools; the result ultimately was complete conflict management failure and sectarian rioting.; In Montreal, the two main educational policy issues bearing on ethnocultural relations have been the language of instruction in publicly funded schools, and varying plans for school governance reorganization in the city. In both policy areas, efforts by the Francophone majority since the mid-1960s--in the province of Quebec at large and in the city of Montreal itself--to implement policies favorable to them have engendered intense conflicts and even some violence.