Across the country this past year students have learned a sari-'n'-curry approach to multiculturalism. Now that school is out, they'll absorb a similar version of multiculturalism at the mall. Both are just variants of America's Hollywood-and-Coke monoculture. PNS commentator Abouali Farmanfarmaian is an educational consultant and a freelance writer.

NEW YORK -- It's summer, finally, the season school children have been waiting for all year. For months they've counted the days, staring at the brightness outside while doing their end-of-the-year projects. All across the nation, the theme that shaped the curriculum was multiculturalism.

Students listened to African-American folk tales and Japanese songs, they wrote up Ethiopian recipes and showed off Indian saris. On the Internet teachers asked people around the world to send their students messages, stories, words of unity and love. "It brings the world closer to them," one teacher explained, although for the most part the messages came from Texas or New Jersey. The drab hallways and cafeterias were filled with colorful pictures of foreign cultures and the smells of foreign cuisine.

The teacher's task is a thankless one, but with the dictates of a multicultural curriculum it's even more so. Teachers I meet are overwhelmed with the immensity of it. How can they possibly know about the culture of everyone in the world let alone in the United States in their classroom ? How can they teach it? Sari-'n'-curry is their only way out. Who can blame them?

And now it's over. Summer is here. More time for movies, MTV, and especially malls. How quickly folk tales and recipes evaporate in the heat.

But the sari-'n'-curry approach only raises students to the same level of shallowness as the consumer world around them. If you can wear a culture, eat it, or buy it, you get it. For a consumer version of multiculturalism, the mall is as good a place as a school to get educated. Most malls have Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Cajun and other food outlets. And the range is expanding, more diversity every day.

To be vaguely inclusive and voguishly multi-culti, the educator has been forced to peg culture down and slice it up. This is African-American culture just as she is an African-American student. But unlike pizza, culture doesn't come in slices and, unlike clothing, it will not carry labels comfortably.

Cultures are alive and porous. They are constantly influencing and being influenced by other cultures. And cultures are the way they are because they're being made and remade by individuals.

There are a thousand and one different cultures within these United States yet everything is dominated by the uniform culture of Hollywood-and-Coke. Malls and MTV, unlike schools, operate all year round. So the multicultural curriculum turns out to be just more of the same made-in-USA monoculture.

In schools, multiculturalism's battle should be less with the "dead White men" of the curriculum than with the tyranny of the marketplace. The task of multicultural education should not be to build a cultural mall. It's unfair to teachers, students and culture itself.

To make multiculturalism work, students should be given a strong dose of an old American tradition --- individualism. The individual makes choices. One choice is to be uniform, to think like TV, act like TV and buy all those things on TV. Another is to be oneself, not an image of something or the shadow of someone else, but an independent being, one that makes culture instead of labeling it and wearing it.

When the students return next September, the walls will be bare and they'll be asked to fill them up again with yearlong multicultural projects. Multiculturalism couldn't do better than if they filled them up with the cultural selves they are becoming.