American Culture - We Do Have One....

America has a culture - A great culture because it respects human dignity.

On 17 December 1941, Walter Lippmann wrote an essay about the fact that teachers were not teaching our culture to our children. He further stated that education is only meaningful within a cultural context - For example, how would our American system of education work in China - a country that does not value freedoms, individuality, or citizenship.  Remember, the classical definition of a citizen is a person who can and does participate in the government - an individual who is not capable of participating or one who does not participate isn't truly a citizen. People who serve under the administration of a king or a tyrant are properly called "subjects," not "citizens."

 I read the article a number of years ago and since that time I have asked a few thousand teachers to write me a paragraph explaining "What is The American Culture" and "What is the Purpose of Education Within the American Culture." My results over the past few decades has been similar to that of Lippmann's - Basically, teachers have no idea about our culture nor how it is manifest.

In a nutshell, our cutlure is defined by the following:
1. We are a culture of liberty and freedoms - which implies that we must be responsible or we will lose them...
2. We are a culture of universal suffrage - we can all vote and this demands that educators do their job so kids realize the complexity and importance of voting properly ... knowing the candidates and knowing the purpose of a democracy
3. We are a participatroy democracy and this has to be stressed to the kids in our schools ... We are the only kind of government that demands that its citizens participate in the government...
4. We are a culture defined by our Bill of Rights ... the guaranteed freedoms we all enjoy and that allows our culture to be a melting pot, a coalition of multicultural fabrics and a tapestry of whatever ...
5. We are a culture defined by the ideals of inalienablity - rights that cannot be taken away by the government, surrendered by us, or given away... (More on this topic in a later blog)...

Schools need to be teaching and demonstrating all of these variables to all our children - especially since many of our students do not have American born parents...

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jane McCormack stated, "If one generatino of young people were to grow up rejecting the language of their parents, the values of their community, or the political committments of thier elders, the nation to which they belong would be changed in irreversable ways." Sadly, this day is at hand - but we can do something about it. We can change and begain anew to teach about our heratige and our American Culture. Understandng these five variables is a first start.

Thanks,
Steve 1951

Thanks for reading my blog...
Steve 1951