Introducing multicultural literature will give students a broader knowledge base and academics will improve.
The argument
The case begins from a finding about reading itself: overall academic achievement improves when students have a stronger literacy and reading background. Reading is not one subject among many but the medium through which every other subject is taught, so the depth and breadth of a student's reading background sets a ceiling on what they can do across the curriculum. Proponents of multicultural literature argue that this makes the composition of a reading list an academic question rather than a purely cultural one. A culturally diverse collection of literature widens the range of texts a student works through, and in doing so strengthens the general reading capacity that the research links to achievement. The claimed benefit is therefore twofold. Students who read across cultures become conscious of ethnic history and subjects they would not otherwise encounter, but alongside that their academic and critical thinking skills strengthen altogether. The second gain is the one this argument treats as decisive, because it is not confined to the literature classroom. Multicultural literature introduces students to current cultural and political issues that can be seen in all subjects, so a student who has met those issues in fiction arrives at history, civics or social science with some prior purchase on the material rather than encountering it cold. Underpinning both is a claim about what literature does to a reader. When students experience the feelings and emotions of others through literature, they are encouraged to look critically at the world: the act of inhabiting an unfamiliar perspective is itself a critical exercise, requiring a reader to hold their own assumptions at arm's length long enough to follow someone else's. Repeated across many texts and many perspectives, that habit becomes a greater understanding of the global community, and the analytical disposition it builds is the one schools are trying to cultivate in every subject.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The reading material doesn’t necessarily have to incorporate diverse people or settings. An overall stronger reading background will improve a student’s academics, regardless if it's multicultural or not.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Literature does not need to be diverse for students to improve academically.