I promise I am almost done quoting Poetic Knowledge incessantly. But I realized that there was something I forgot when I did my two recap posts.
Actually, this is a subject I’ve thought about a lot because there is a big push to educate children from a perspective of the entire world instead of the culture in which they live. This has never made sense to me, and the main reason for that is my own experience. I was educated right before there was a super-huge multiculture push. So I primarily experienced my own culture, and then a bit of Mexican culture, but then I’m not sure that is a bad thing seeing as the town I lived in was actually about 50% Mexican immigrants. Becoming familiar with Mexican culture a bit helped me get along in the world I was in, I suppose.
When I entered college, I began to really appreciate other cultures. For the first time, I tested foreign foods {and found that I liked a lot of them}. I read books about exotic places and was captivated by them. And I think that I appreciated these cultures because they were so other than the culture I was raised in.
It was all about contrast.
Today, kids are told that they need to learn about so many other cultures from the time they are very young. Children’s books are packed with stories of African tribes and South American adventures and such. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, but I think that there is something to be said for first immersing a child in their own culture, and then later moving on to familiarizing them with other cultures.
We also seem to be becoming a people without a culture {popular culture being not a real culture}, and I think it might be connected to not treating any one culture as our own.
Here is a somewhat lengthy quote from Taylor:
In the school of the poetic mode of education, there are very few books indeed, and the ones used, in a sense, choose us before we chose them; that is, these are the books of our tradition, which is the Western tradition. No amount of forced multiculturalism in the schools can change the fact that we are born at a certain time into a certain culture and tradition, and no amount of study of, for example, the culture of the East, will make us any more Eastern when reading translations of Tibetan folk stories, as will be our culturally instinctive response to the world of the stories of Grimm and Andersen. And, turning this the other way, a school in the Orient would do well to read those stories that have been handed down to them by their tradition. It is not a question of being exclusive or xenophobic; it is rather to recognize that the taking on of another’s culture and traditions is unnecessary and inappropriate at this level of education. The study of Chinese literature, for example, would be a very good thing to do, gathering as much information about Chinese philosophy, politics, life, and manners, not to mention some attempt at learning to translate the language–all necessary collateral studies precisely because the story or poem was not written in our tradition and we would need to do as much ‘homework’ as possible to recreate the circumstances for its appreciation. But to accomplish the conditions for reading stories from China is the work of the graduate student on the way to becoming a specialist, an expert in a particular field. The school of the poetic mode remains a school of beginners. {emphasis mine}
Now, I would never take this to mean the children should exclusively be exposed to their own culture to the point of crazy measures like avoiding missionary stories or speaking to widely-traveled persons! However, this quote is referring to the school. What do we take the time to study?
I was thinking about this also in terms of literacy. For instance, why does the mariner in Kipling’s Just So Stories say that his natal home is the “white cliffs of Albion”? Well, if you are doing Year 1 of Ambleside {which is focused on Western, English-speaking tradition}, you learned {by reading Fifty Famous Stories Retold} the story of Albion and Brutus and just how Britain acquired its name. Your six-year-old therefore makes a connection to ancient folklore {and knows that the “white cliffs of Albion” refer to Britain} while reading Kipling, something many adults are incapable of.
If we rigorously study many traditions from a very young age, my hunch is that our traditions will become a mere curiosity and have very little, if any, depth. Any culture doing such a thing might be jeopardizing itself.
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