Culture & Education

It’s 1820. A South Seas islander is walking along a familiar beach, when he suddenly drops to his knees and begins to thank his gods for the unimaginably generous gift they have left there for him and his tribe: a year’s supply of fire wood.

At the same instant an English naval captain is rounding the other end of the island, heading in the islander’s direction. He picks up his spy glass for a closer look at the beach, and confirms his worst fears: a sister schooner lies smashed to pieces on the beach, a gaping canon ball hole in its side.

Fire wood or shipwreck? Both men are taking in the identical external reality, but investing it with profoundly different meanings. Because of their culture.

How would an educator go about teaching each man about the other’s reality?

It would require an extremely long time and an intricately contrived lesson plan to educate the islander to the Englishman’s perspective. The islander has no idea what a schooner is. He doesn’t know what a navy is or what it does. The educator would have to patiently build up the concepts of sawn lumber, iron, canon balls, nation states, war, and why it made sense to the men aboard two majestic ships to try to destroy each other and the objects that so many had toiled to build.

It would be relatively easy to explain to the Englishman what the islander experienced: due to the islander’s religious beliefs – no, his superstitions – the islander mistook the pile of lumber for a gift from the gods. The sea captain would apprehend that in minutes.

Simple, right?

No. The educator had not even begun to impart to the Englishman the overwhelming sense of awe and fear and gratitude that swept over the islander when he came upon the … fire wood. This was not some fifth-standard-deviation event, like winning a lottery, that the islander lucked out on; this was outside anything he or anyone else in his tribe had ever known or imagined before. The Englishman’s desiccated Enlightenment rationality had been carefully trained from birth to dismiss all such ideas as emotions or fantasies and, thus, as literally un-real.

In fact, it would be an enormous educational challenge to teach each man what the other knew.

I believe the modern educator’s job only differs in scale, not essence. I hope this is the case. Two Englishman or two islanders discussing what they saw would produce close to nothing in the way of new knowledge; no “education” would be taking place. It’s only when people who bring different perspectives to the same realities that education is even possible. Teaching-learning is about uncovering and constructing new points-of-view, especially your own.

The educator turns those differences into lessons by contriving classroom experiences that allow each person present to expand their perspectives. There are two keys to this process of engineering successful educational experiences: open-mindedness and goodwill. These two virtues don’t overcome cultural differences, they turn cultural differences into positive energies.