The number of children of multicultural families in schools has reached some 67,800, accounting for slightly more than 1 percent of all students.

This represents a 21.6 percent increase over the previous year, and the number is expected to reach 100,000 within the next three years, according to the Education Ministry.

Children from families of diverse cultural backgrounds pose challenges for the education system in that it must create programs that can help the children ease into the school system and flourish.

For a start, textbooks should be revised to remove prejudices associated with the term “multicultural families.” A survey commissioned by the Education Ministry on depictions of multicultural families in five high school textbooks showed that the textbooks gave the impression that “multicultural families” were “others” as opposed to “us.”

A balance must be struck between assimilation and maintaining one’s cultural heritage. To this end, children from multicultural families should be encouraged to learn the language and culture of both parents. The general trend so far has been for families to discourage the children from speaking the language of the non-Korean parent, usually the mother, unless that language is English, out of fear that it might lead to the children not acquiring proficiency in the Korean language.

However, the Korean immigrant experience in the United States proves that that is a short-sighted view. When a large wave of Korean immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, they often forbade their children from speaking Korean at home, anxious that their children would acquire the language of their adopted land quickly. Today, however, Korean-Americans who are proficient in Korean and comfortable with Korean culture play an important role in bridging the two countries.

In the not-too-distant future, the children of Vietnamese, Chinese, Mongolian and Filipino mothers here may play the same role. The Education Ministry this year allocated 21.5 billion toward educational programs for multicultural students, a 38 percent increase over the previous year. It is important that children of multicultural families receive any extra help they require, just as other children here do.