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Expat's Eye
Print Edition> Expat's Eye
UPDATED: February 25, 2007 NO.9 MAR.1, 2007
The Meat and Potatoes of Culture
By ROBERT T. TUOHEY
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Chinese students majoring in English regularly receive a variety of courses on "foreign culture." Most common are classes outlining British and American culture. Now, anyone who has put some thought into this matter should not only recognize the general importance of this information, but also be able to enumerate the specific goals aimed at.

However, very strange to relate, a large number of teachers, foreign and Chinese, seem to have only the foggiest notion of what they are trying to accomplish in these courses. Most foreign teachers, suddenly confronted with the problem of conveying something of "cultural importance" within 15 brief weeks, opt for the "smorgasbord" approach: Each week a general topic (e.g., holidays) is introduced, a list of key words scrawled across the blackboard, with "activities" (usually amounting to nothing more than conversation) capping the class. The Chinese teachers, however, lacking this general background information, rely instead on force-feeding their students a stale academic diet of "facts and figures" (e.g., population, major cities, and so on). The results of these half-baked ideas, however, are as predictable as unpalatable: The students can't digest a bit of it.

Thus, I deem it high time to scrub out the pan and get the recipe right.

Beyond its simplest, denotative aspect, human language conveys it's meaning via implication and connotation. These two elements, by definition, are dependent upon a commonly shared background, which, in the widest sense, is what culture is.

For example, an educated speaker of English might refer to a certain type of poor economic practice as "robbing Peter to pay Paul." Or, again, an American male might remark that there was a "knock out" at his office that he'd asked on a date, but that he "struck out."

Now, unless you are acquainted with the Bible, boxing, and baseball, these examples are all Greek to you.

Let's take an example from Chinese: ba miao zhu zhang, meaning to pull on the seedlings to help them to grow. Although this idiom finds an apparently easy equivalent in "haste makes waste," unless in fact you know something of the long struggle China has had in adequately feeding and educating its large population, the saying loses all but its most superficial meaning.

Today, irrevocably, China has assumed its position in the international arena. Ergo, the higher education system in this country has an obligation, not only in regard to its foreign language majors but indeed all its university students, to provide some kind of information about the world-at-large.

If a university student in China graduates and yet is unable to find France on the map, thinks Plato is a type of dish, and has two words to describe the United States (New York and money), I submit to you that that student is unqualified as a citizen of the modern world.

It's the job of culture classes to prevent this type of blatant ignorance.

Admittedly, this is a challenge, worldwide, for educators. But, then again, as we've certainly managed to incorporate computer literacy into the curriculum, it's not too much to ask that we know a bit about our neighbors.

Putting aside linguistic competence and general world knowledge (which are mere technical matters), we finally arrive at the most important point of cultural studies: an examination of what it means to be human.

Simply put, via the contemplation of the greatest achievements in philosophy, literature and the arts, we approach an understanding of what humanity has been, and could be.

Indeed, how much poorer my world would be without Shakespeare's tragedies, without Laozi's sublime mediations, without Dali's surreal clocks!

Thus, from second-language proficiency to overall knowledge of the world to a deeper understanding of ourselves, individually and collectively, culture classes have a tall order to fill. I like to paraphrase the Latin "Ars longa, Vita brevis" (Art is long, Life is short), for my students as "There's a lot more to this than I can fit into 15 weeks!" The essential point, however, remains valid: I know what I want to convey, have arranged that material into a logical sequence, and do my best to make this information relevant to my students' concerns.

With these goals in mind I can serve up a culture class that is satisfying to both the minds and imaginations of students.

The writer is an American teaching in Shanxi Province



 
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