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"And where were you educated?"
01/29/2004 Entry
[I posted a similar entry on Crooked Timber a few days ago. It led to a long discussion that you may want to look at.]
Last week in class I asked my students where we had all learned that we are not supposed to kill people. (Let’s set aside for the moment why this question would come up in a grad seminar on the Social Implications of Info and Communication Technologies.. the question seemed to make sense at the time.:) When I posed the question I wasn’t sure about my own answer to it so I was especially surprised when I saw that most students (of the eight in this class) had an immediate response: church.
Having grown up in Hungary where religious education in the 70s and 80s was not part of most people’s upbringing, I’ve always been fascinated by how prevalent it seems in so many Americans’ lives. I am curious whether my question would have led to similar responses by people who grew up elsewhere (or even others in the US). For me this has always been a bit of a paradigm shift. It’s also an example of why I think it’s helpful for social scientists (or anyone else for that matter) to live in a different country at some point. It really helps in understanding how much social and cultural context can matter in how people view and understand the world.
By the way, my own candidates for a response to my question would have been school, family or the media not that I recall any specific instances of learning about this particular matter. Figuring out where people learn things that seem so intrinsically obvious later is a fascinating subject. It is to me anyway which might explain why I became a sociologist.:)
Replies: 1 Comment has been posted, click here to see it and add your own
The question is fraught with national biases that should be explored.
Of course, a new emigrant will always favor living in 2 cultures at least. Many countries (small ones especially) prefer people who've lived abroad. Swiss law favored marriages of Swiss men to foreign women. Finns read more newspapers than any country. And so on.
On the other hand, there are cultures like France. Japan and northern Italy, who doubt any binational can go very deep.
The question seems like a poll: do you feel provincial, or not?
I'd certainly grant for my case that I agree with you. But so what. As a second-gen Swiss-American, I'm still primed by culture learned at home to treat the encounter of a foreigner as a big opportunity.
Which brings up the tired Swiss joke of the Swiss German who's laboring to practice his French on a Swiss French, fishes for a compliment, and finds the Swiss French is bored to be used again like a piece of gym equipment.
In any case, the issue is whether what you or I think is a good requirement passes the test of escaping the fundamental attribution error that you or I as binationals would fall prey to in supporting it as a requirement.
How would one test if the requirement helps, or not?
Posted by Toni Wuersch @ 02/09/2004 11:26 PM CST
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