"When should culture be taught?
Culture should be taught when we have students to teach."
-Ned Seelye, Teaching Culture: Strategies for Intercultural Communication (1974)
In researching for my Master's Report, I'm currently reading the above-quoted book, and I found one of his points necessary to share.
Though Seelye specifically works as a Spanish language teacher and discusses the teaching of culture in a foreign language classroom, he advocates the incorporation of cultural knowledge into all our courses in education and as early as possible. He acknowledges the teacher's concern with how this can be done (i.e., "How would I even teach that, assuming I had time?"), but emphasizes that teaching culture is about equipping students with skills to study, inquire, and relate with other cultures, rather than with information (trivia-type facts) about other cultures. "While a convenient place to begin learning about the target culture is in our foreign language classes, culture must be taught systematically in addition to purely linguistic concerns. ...[J]ust as culture cannot be ignored in foreign language classes the role of language in human thought cannot be ignored in social studies classes that aspire to develop intercultural communication skills."
I think Seelye's point about including intercultural skills in all subjects would clearly be an effective change in our schools, but I think editing our views and practices in foreign languages could have drastic and positive effects, as well.
I've spoken with many people who wish their children had the opportunity to study languages in public school as early as kindergarten or elementary school. It seems that generally people assume that learning languages that early is the "best" way to do it (there's research that indicates advantages to children and others to adults, so whatever your age, you have skills that will help you greatly), and I wonder if we might be able to begin with our children by teaching language with an emphasis on intercultural communication. In this way, students would progress through their early years of school with this recurring theme of cultural curiosity and understanding that would not only be a healthy social change for us in the U.S., but would also be an amazing way of teaching our students to use critical and independent thinking skills. Not to mention it would provide us with an opportunity to learn how to use the metric system, which to this day eludes me; I wish I had been taught to think in both Metric and U.S. customary systems. --That's a personal motive, of course.
But if we seriously considered the benefits that exist for teaching our students foreign languages from primary school through college, we would be astounded. One problem we have is that our timeline for learning a language is skewed; taking a language for two years does not guarantee that you will be an "intermediate" level learner. We don't teach English (or any other subject) that way, so why would we teach other languages in such a rushed manner? Teaching languages long-term throughout school would allow students to reach near-native proficiency by the time they leave public schools. Multi-lingual, globally conscious, culturally sensitive graduating classes from our high schools would go on to college and the world to make strong, qualified, intelligent leaders. Why would we not want to seize this opportunity?
I don't foresee these types of changes in the U.S., though they would certainly have positive and lasting effects on future generations. Other countries recognize the benefits of multilingualism. I only hope we can someday recognize them, too.
