A Meta-Analysis of Research on Multicultural Education, Citizenship Education, Moral Education, Political Education and Religious Education In Iran

Schools always need to respond to the values of social classes in the society to gain legitimacy. Since the values are not limited to academic progress and technical-economic achievements, it is expected that schools respond to a diverse human and social values. Therefore, Schools need to institutionalize education that is linked to social and human value. The human-social values are manifested in dimensions such as multicultural education, citizenship education, ethics education, political education and religious education. In fact, In order for schools to be accepted in the society and among different social classes, they must also institutionalize human-social values. Accordingly, the legitimacy of schools depends on responding to a diverse values. Indeed, only through institutionalizing accepted human-social values, schools can be accepted in the society and also can establish a stable social base for themselves. Therefore, schools are expected to accept cultural and racial diversity and create an opportunity to reduce inequalities and cultural biases; make students understand citizenship rights; educate the students ethics and make them a real human beings; finally, to institutionalize spiritual and religious values as a stable trend in them. The importance of these values has gone so far that some researches have shown that school leaders can penetrate their followers and lead them to higher goals by rely on value systems and create values. Different researches have evaluated the current status of Iran's educational system in responding to human-social values. It is possible to evaluate the performance of the educational system by obtaining a comprehensive view of the researches which is conducted up to now. The present research aimed to evaluate the issue through a systematic review of all researches conducted in Iran. Although different researches in Iran have investigated aspects of multicultural education, religious education, ethics education, political education and citizenship education, but now there is a need to integrate these researches to obtain a comprehensive view. Legitimacy is based on the evaluations of powerful stakeholders. This means that powerful stakeholders in society evaluate the mechanisms of an organization (in this case, the educational system). If the organization has been able to institutionalize their values in its mechanisms, it will receive the financial aids and other support from those stakeholders. As a result, the organization will be stable and constant. But if that organization cannot institutionalize that values, the aids and support of the stakeholders will decrease or be cut off, and according to Illich, de-schooling will happen in the society.  For the sake of this reason, when an organization is in crisis and its reputation is criticized, the managers and policy makers of that organization have to react immediately and repair the damage to their reputation. Therefore, it seems that organizations are always forced to respond to the demands and expectations of stakeholders and organize their mechanisms in such a way that those demands and expectations are internalized and institutionalize in the organization. Depending on the diversity and influence of the stakeholders in a society, we are faced with two approaches for legitimization. I have named these two approaches as engineered approach and diversity approach. Educational systems that institutionalize values through engineered approach, institutionalize a unified identity and culture. Therefore, the values related to the official and dominant culture of the society are taken into consideration but other values which is different from the dominant culture are neglected. This means that the social institutions of the society internalize the values of the dominant class and powerful shareholders in such an approach. An institution that adopts diversity approach firstly accepts comprehensiveness. For example, schools in this approach accept that education is a comprehensive process and an aspect of education shouldn’t be reduced in favor of another aspect. In such an approach, it is not acceptable to pay attention only to economic and technical values and ignore other social and cultural aspects. In this approach, it is also accepted that the demographic, religious, and racial composition of a society is not uniform. Therefore, diversity and differences should be accepted and respected and the values of diversity in School should be institutionalized. This research was done to provide a clear and comprehensive picture of the status of institutionalization of these values by relying on the researches that have investigated multicultural education, citizenship education, moral education, political education and religious education. Qualitative meta-analysis method was used for this purpose. Therefore, qualitative meta-analysis method was used, which tries to integrate the findings of all researches. Then, discover the basic elements of those researches and conceptualize the findings and general directions in a new format. Finally, interpret and explain those elements and findings. The entry and exit criteria for the research were determined and based on that, the research reports were selected and organized. The entry criteria included the research nature of the study and also describing the current situation. Therefore, any promotional or review studies were excluded from the research process. In addition, any study that dealt with a topic other than describing the current situation was excluded from the research process. The exclusion criterion was the low quality of the study, for which the CASP checklist was used. 89 final researches were studied and analyzed in the form of a census. Among these 89 studies, 27 studies were related to multicultural education, 29 studies were related to citizenship education, 16 studies were related to moral education, 10 studies were related to political education, and finally, 7 studies were related to religious education. In addition, the oldest research was related to 2008 and the most recent was related to 2020. Considering this frequency distribution, it is clear that less researches had investigated the current situation of religious education and political education. The findings of the current research showed that the institutionalization of human-social values was weak and ineffective. From a quantitative and numerical point of view, textbooks, educational models and educational evaluations have paid insufficient and inappropriate attention to human-social values. From a qualitative point of view, the approach taken in teaching these values has been based on passive, mechanical and conservative methods that do not lead to deep learning in students. In this way, students have become familiar with many cultural, moral, religious and citizenship values only at the conceptual level, but since these values have not been given enough attention, as well as, active approaches that need to consider the awareness and freedom of students have not been used, values such as moral virtue, peaceful coexistence, law-oriented ethics, true belief in spiritual values have become foreign words and actions in the educational system. In addition, the findings of the current research showed that schools have only focused on the values that follow the education of obedient citizens, adhere to social integrated values and are in line with official national, patriotic and religious values. be This is despite the fact that this method does not lead to the deep institutionalization of uniform and integrated social values. In fact, only free and conscious education can lead to the development and movement towards values. This is also the reason that the only condition of education is not the transfer of values and culture, but this transfer should be free and conscious to internalize the deep layers of culture in the students. This institutionalization of values leads to breeding (not education). In breeding, only the superficial and insignificant level of a culture can be transferred to students by relying on indoctrination and repetition, as well as forcing and restraining, and the institutionalization of values is reduced to the transfer of information and mere knowledge enhancement. This is while the information-oriented method, memorization and repetition, indoctrination and imposition leads to superficial and fragile learning. While in order to internalize values, a true and stable tendency must be created in the student to move and to turn, and this can only be done in active, dynamic, free and conscious ways. In the same way, not only the racial, cultural, ethnic and religious differences of the learners are not paid much attention to, but even the inner nature of the learner is also neglected.