Culture

[This post is late]

I still have some thoughts in my head about our talks regarding culture this week. Culture seems to me to be a bit of a catfish to define, it's big and wriggly and hard to get a handle on. I still have some skepticism as to whether it means anything. but as I see it there are two main understandings of what culture means. The first is the one that most of the people in the cohort were operating under, that which separates one's family from everybody else's family. Another is culture as meaning a large group of people with a shared history. For example, I see myself as part of a few of these cultures, American, Scots-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Northern European, and on a larger level, Western. These are my people, and their history is the story of the honored dead, my ancestors, which is how I understand myself as being in these cultures. Perhaps this is not the sort of understanding of culture that was expected for the self documentation assignment, but I think it may be useful to think a little more about this type of culture. It may be less immediate than the first understanding, but that may actually be a reason why it is so important to study. I think when we go to teach about culture, we consider both terms and clarify our terms when we are teaching remembering that the less clarified a term is, the less useful it is.

Another thought I had about culture came from the cultural standard listed in the lesson about animal classification in the Yu'pik region. It read, "Live a life in accordance with the cultural values and traditions of the local community and integrate them into their everyday behavior." In all honesty, I don't think that this standard has any place in an American public school and I have a couple of reasons.

1. It is not at all assessable. In fact it does not have just one unassessable learning target, it has four. First, living in accordance to a cultural value. Second, living in accordance to a cultural tradition. Third, integrating a cultural value into everyday behavior. Fourth, integrating a cultural tradition into everyday behavior. A teacher cannot assess any of these reliably at school, which makes the standard useless at best.

2. I think that this assessment is more than useless though, I think that it has some serious moral problems with it. Where is it the schools, and by extension, the government's business to instruct a child to be just like everybody around them, to believe and value the same things? This is akin to saying to a child, "act like a white christian apostate, since all the people around you are white christian apostates." I want to be careful to draw a distinction between this brand of government sponsored relativism and teaching American virtues such as freedom, respect for private property, and tolerance. This standard says to act a certain way since it is how the people around you act, rather one should teach a child to act a certain way because those ways of being are based on morals that transcend time and space. For example, a child should not follow the golden rule, do unto others as you would be done by, because it is what is popular, it is all too often not. They should live by it because it is right.

Culture is a great tool that humanity has developed, and we have learned many tools by it. We must be careful though to mot place it on too high a pedestal, lest the tool become a foreman to hard for out freedom and our reason to bear.

How to Assess Values

I was planning a series of Sunday School lessons recently and I tried to apply backward design to it. At first it was easy, there were a few Essential Understandings that I wanted to communicate, and a few Essential Questions for the children (3rd through 5th grade) to ask themselves. But when I got to the bit for assessment I was really stumped. Part of it was because I was working within an existing framework with a very limited amount of time and a whole lot of content and with a few other people, but the other part is that what I really want to teach are virtues and a way of life, which are hard to assess. To be sure, the only true assessment of whether one learns a value or a virtue is to look at how they behave in their day to day life, and in the constant and minute decisions that life offers, especially in times of hardship. However, the times of hardship where lessons of morals and values are most valuable cannot be artificially constructed by a classroom teacher, they happen in unpredictable moments of crisis or sorrow. The case of teaching christian virtues is not directly applicable to public schools, although we do often teach similar morals. It did however remind me of our social studies textbook and how it talks about teaching democratic virtues and it made me wonder, how can we construct assessments for these? We can of course have them write about making good decisions, or have them behave virtuously in a simulation, but it is a sight easier to act like you possess a virtue in a classroom environment than to actually live by it as a lasting part of on'es being. Can one ultimately assess a child's true character? This itself may only happen on an informal level in our observations of the child's interaction with each other, are they kind? are they just? do they live their neighbor? do they do as they have been done by? In this way, knowing the student takes on an even greater role, that of assessing the content of a child's character. And a good character is perhaps the most important part of the child a teacher can tend to and help grow.