Chapter 11: Educating the Next Generation: Culture-Centered Teaching for School-Aged Children

The idea of living in a world without boundaries is becoming increasingly real. Technology affords us the opportunity of “real-time” communication despite geographical distance or political barriers. We frequently interact with individuals who are culturally different from us; yet, it is often true that we are socialized to prefer a similarity of values. This is not exclusive to the United States; in an effort to survive, every society strives to achieve a certain continuity of core values. One danger of maintaining cultural continuity, however, is that a society risks becoming exclusionary and reductionistic, focusing on a limited (and limiting) set of values which can exclude individuals with dissimilar value systems. As the world grows ever closer, a diversity of cultures is manifest. We are interacting with individuals across continents and can directly observe significant value differentials. Learning about other people and discovering different ways of seeing the world helps us realize the partiality of the perspectives we hold.