Page 88 - Cultures and Organizations

70 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

intellectual paths. Students make uninvited interventions in class; they
are supposed to ask questions when they do not understand something.
They argue with teachers, express disagreement and criticisms in front
of the teachers, and show no particular respect to teachers outside school.
When a child misbehaves, parents often side with the child against the
teacher. The educational process is rather impersonal; what is transferred
are “truths” or “facts” that exist independently of this particular teacher.
Effective learning in such a system depends very much on whether the
supposed two-way communication between students and teacher is, indeed,
established. The entire system is based on the students’ well-developed
need for independence; the quality of learning is to a considerable extent
determined by the excellence of the students.
Earlier in this chapter it was shown that power distance scores are
lower for occupations needing a higher education, at least in countries that
as a whole score relatively low on power distance. This means that in these
countries, students will become more independent from teachers as they
proceed in their studies: their need for dependence decreases. In large-
power-distance countries, however, students remain dependent on teachers
even after reaching high education levels.
Small-power-distance countries spend a relatively larger part of
their education budget on secondary schools for everybody, contribut-
ing to the development of middle strata in society. Large-power-distance
countries spend relatively more on university-level education and less on
secondary schools, maintaining a polarization between the elites and the
uneducated.
Corporal punishment at school, at least for children of prepuberty age,
is more acceptable in a large-power-distance culture than in its opposite.
It accentuates and symbolizes the inequality between teacher and student

and is often considered good for the development of the child’s character.

In a small-power-distance society, it will readily be classified as child abuse
and may be a reason for parents to complain to the police. There are excep-
tions, which relate to the dimension of masculinity (versus femininity) to be
described in Chapter 5: in some masculine, small-power-distance cultures,
such as Great Britain, corporal punishment at school is not con sidered
objectionable by everybody.
As in the case of the family as discussed in the previous section, real-
ity is somewhere in between these extremes. An important conditioning