Inquiry: How Hierarchical Thinking Affects People's Lives
In this reading, a young girl talks about how it feels to be excluded. Discuss the questions that follow.
Learning from Diversity
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What are some things that you do in your families (traditions, ways of greeting or saying good-bye) that you have noticed other people don't do? How does that feel? If you have students in your class with strong ethnic backgrounds, ask them if there are things that they do in their families that many others in the community don't understand.
- Cultural identity and pride.
Research the cultures or ethnic groups of those already in your school or community. Learn also what different cultures are proud of, teach their children about and hope to perpetuate: their history, arts, scientific accomplishments, and/or social structures.
- Solidarity.
Devise some way of brining, together the different ethnic or cultural groups in your community in such a way that:
- the particular worth of each becomes apparent
- each contributes to the community's variety and richness
Analysis Questions
- What have these learning projects taught you about the worth of different cultures and ethnic groups?
- When people become citizens of a new country, do you think that they should try to keep their own cultural identities? In what ways does their diversity, contribute to your community? your country?
Universal Dignity and Worth
In the Part III projects you may have been surprised at how much diverse cultures have in common.
The Parts Come Together
(excerpts from 1992 Nobel Prize speech)
[In 1992 Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born poet and playwright, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In his Nobel lecture he spoke about the diverse ethnic groups brought to the Caribbean Antilles as slaves or indentured servants and how these fragments are coming together in a new, enriched and stronger whole. He ties this process to the way a poet creates.]
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole... It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars.
This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.
This is the exact process of the making of poetry, or what should be called not its "making" but its remaking; the fragmented memory ... combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously, the past and the present, the buried language and the individual vocabulary ... the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self discovery... Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody. Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture.
The original language dissolve's from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe... The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes; these shards of a tribal vocabulary.
For every poet it is always morning in the world-history a forgotten, insomniac night. History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.
Evaluation and Conclusions
Evaluation: Are Your Hierarchical Habits Changing?
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Do you think you are more careful now about making assumptions concerning the worth of different cultures?
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What has this unit meant to you? Has it made you more sensitive to the ways people treat one another? To what extent do your actions matter to others?
Other Ideas for Teachers
There are endless ways in which culture and development can be incorporated into existing curricula. Culture studies, of course, have always been important in international education. UN resources can give this teaching a further and more up-to-date dimension.
In culture studies you can bring out the richness of diversity and also the essential unity of humanity. For this the Silk Road Project would be a particularly imaginative adventure to focus on. The World Heritage List shows that some natural and man-made works are beyond national value and should be recognized and preserved for all living beings to come. Some people are beyond national importance; Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, have expressed the hopes and concerns of all. These too can be useful in international education.
Human rights are central to the UN's call for "a fairer share in the responsibilities and opportunities and benefits related to international economic activity" and its effort to find "the means for constructing a more sensible and just world community."
The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights called for increased coordination on human rights within the United Nations. The Conference considered the elimination of racism and racial discrimination, in particular in their institutionalized forms, as a primary objective for the international community. Issues related to indigenous people, migrant workers and the equal status and human rights of women and children were also key items on the Programme of Action of this meeting held in Vienna.
The Human Rights Watch, an independent non-governmental organization, pointed out in its 1997 World Report: "While the major global powers wavered in their commitment to human rights, 1996 saw the emergence of new and powerful sources of support for the human rights cause."
These matters will become more real, of course, when they are related to specific local situations. Students might investigate the housing situation in their own and/or another country to discover whether there is discrimination against a group because of race, colour, religion, ethnicity or national origin. Choose a particular case (such as land ownership in rural areas, squatters in cities or housing for low-income workers) and find out what can be done about it.
Comments for Students
Open to the New and Different — "Ouverture d'esprit"
To prepare for the future we need to become flexible and free of fear of the unknown. We must be open to — welcome — learn from — the new and different. These days you should find plenty of chances to develop these abilities.
Development and Diversity
In most communities and schools there are newcomers from other cultures. Appreciating their worth, however, can be difficult in cultures hierarchical values. One still hears too much about people or countries which are "developed" or "underdeveloped", "advanced" or "backward". The truth — fortunately — is that ALL are developing; none are fully developed without the potential for further growth.
Naturally not all are developing in identical ways. Each is rich and each is poor in some way. Some societies have concentrated on material progress; others may be more concerned with harmonious social relationships or philosophical exploration. Some, like desert nomads, have evolved skills which enable them to live in environments where the unskilled would perish.
Learning from Diversity
People or countries do not need to adopt the development models evolved by others, but they can learn from each other's experiences. For .example, although rural economies may wish to modernize, the), would like to avoid many undesirable elements of industrialization.
"Ouverture d'esprit"
"Opening the spirit" can mean more than reacting positively to the new and different or welcoming your country's diverse cultures. You may feel that these new ideas and experiences have released you from fears and prejudices — that your spirit is free to soar — that you can grow and fulfil your special capabilities.
