Page 459 - Cultures and Organizations

424 IMPLICATIONS

In terms of the foregoing quotes, the message of this book so far has been
that everybody is like Herodotus’s experimental subjects and Hume’s or
Goring’s English. Everybody looks at the world from behind the windows
of a cultural home, and everybody prefers to act as if people from other
countries have something special about them (a national character), but
home is normal. Unfortunately, there is no normal position in cultural
matters. This is an uncomfortable message, as uncomfortable as Galileo
Galilei’s claim in the seventeenth century that Earth is not the center of
the universe.
The basic skill for surviving in a multicultural world, as has been

argued, is understanding first one’s own cultural values and next the cul-
tural values of the others with whom one has to cooperate. As parents,

we have more influence on creating multicultural understanding in future
world citizens than in any other role. Values are mainly acquired dur-

ing the first ten years of a child’s life. They are absorbed by observation
and imitation of adults and older children rather than by indoctrination.
The way parents live their own culture provides the child with his or her
cultural identity. The way parents talk about and behave toward persons
and groups from other cultures determines the degree to which the child’s
mind will be opened or closed for cross-cultural understanding.
Growing up in a bicultural environment can be an asset to a child.
This environment can take the form of having parents from different
nationalities, living abroad during childhood, or attending a foreign
school. Whether such biculturality really is an asset or instead becomes a
liability depends on the parents’ ability to cope with the bicultural situa-
tion themselves. Having foreign friends, hearing different languages spo-
ken, and traveling with parents who awaken the children’s interests in
things foreign are definite assets. Learning at least one other language

is a unique ingredient of education for multicultural understanding. This

supposes, of course, that the teaching of the other language is effective: a
lot of language classes in schools are a waste of time. The stress should
be on full immersion, whereby using the foreign language becomes indis-
pensable for practical purposes. Becoming truly bi- or multilingual is one
of the advantages available to children belonging to a minority group or

to a small nation. It is more difficult for those belonging to a large nation,
unless of course that nation is itself multilingual, as for example in the
case of India.