Chapter 8 Moving Beyond a Monotype Education in Turkey: Major Reforms in the Last Decade and Challenges Ahead Zafer Çelik, Sedat Gümüş and Bekir S. Gür Educational researchers and policy-makers all over the world have paid increased attention to multicultural education in recent decades. This is because of the changing social environment associated with, for example, the increasing number of minorities/refugees in many developed countries, the renewed importance of international economic relations, and the wider spread of cosmopolitan citizenship as an important educational goal (see Banks; Cha, Ham and Yang; Ramirez, Bromley and Russell, all in this volume). Indeed, multicultural education has, in no small measures, emerged as a response to social dynamics induced by globalization and democratization movements, and become one of the highly discussed education trends in developed countries in particular. The understanding of multicultural education is based on a hypothesis that students from some social groups and cultures are disadvantaged in the current school systems, and defends the necessity of restructuring schools in a way to provide equal opportunity to all students of different genders, social classes, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures (Banks 2013). Bennett (1999) states that multicultural education is a learning–teaching approach that relies on democratic values, aiming to support social and intellectual devel- opments of all students in societies cohabitated by different cultures. Although most researchers have asserted that multicultural education is a necessity for the countries populated with social–cultural diversities, there are also others who see multicultural education as a threat. In many countries, particularly nationalist circles assume that people of different social groups will be less com- mitted to their host countries and the dominant culture if they remain attached to their own cultural identities. However, advocates of multicultural education assert that strong cultural identities will help people to integrate with the society they live Z. Çelik Á B.S. Gür Yildirim Beyazit University, Ankara, Turkey S. Gümüş (&) Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, Turkey e-mail: gumussed@gmail.com © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 Y.-K. Cha et al. (eds.), Multicultural Education in Glocal Perspectives, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2222-7_8 103 gumussed@gmail.com