Culture is everything we never think about and yet it permeates and even conditions everything we can think of. Culture is not only shaped by an inherited and shared knowledge but also by the way the mind organizes and processes this knowledge.
For that reason, culture is a key factor in the learning process. Together, culture and cognition help people understand, memorize, and even create content. Culture influences how we learn and what we learn because it affects how the brain interprets, alters, and filters stimuli.
Until the end of the 20th century, education was almost exclusively limited to the transmission of national cultures in isolation, which it now needs to integrate with a more global perspective of the world. The "nationalistic" approach embedded in traditional education is very obvious in the priority given to national history and literature; both are still mainly conceived and taught as expressions of a specific people's identity rather than as part of intercultural, global dynamics. In the French-American school where I teach, middle schoolers have different classes for French and American literature and history, even though the same bilingual students take both classes. This is a very clear example of how challenging it can be to cross cultural boundaries and integrate curriculum while meeting national standards and requirements.
Preparing students for the world of the future requires a revolution in education, moving from the mere transmission of national cultures to their integration. We can start facilitating this revolution toward cultural integration by preparing students to investigate how culture works in their own lives.
In-Class Cultural Investigation Activity
A simple activity to help students investigate their cultures is to replicate the famous 1932 "War of the Ghosts" experiment by Frederic Bartlett. The "War of the Ghosts" is a Navajo folk story that is written in a very unfamiliar way and contains many alien references for people of other cultures. Through his experiment, Bartlett showed that both serial reproduction (a participant reads the story, writes it down from memory, and gives his notes to a second participant who reads this version, writes it down from memory, gives his notes to a third participants, and so on) and repeated reproduction (the same participant reads the story and writes it down from memory with different time gaps, from minutes to years) led British participants to produce summaries that were increasingly distorted in terms of the original (Navajo) story but more and more coherent in terms of their own (British) cultural background.
In the version I use with my International Baccalaureate (IB) psychology class, students work with the incipit of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text that depicts the battle between the Paandavas— who aim to restore order in the universe (Dharma) under the patronage of Lord Krishna—and their cousins, who are usurping Paandavas— power. I chose the Bhagavad Gita as the text for this exercise because it is both rich in cultural references and alien to someone from another background. Below are the steps necessary to carry out the activity.
Step 1: Read, Recall, Rewrite
Students in the first row of the classroom spend a few minutes reading and memorizing a summary of the opening to the Bhagavad Gita, write down what they can recall on a piece of paper, and then hand it down to the second row. This process continues with each row and, ultimately, the students in the back row read their summaries aloud. When they do, the sacred Hindu text has usually turned into something much more similar to a Pixar movie, with a Panda rescuing an imaginary princess. All traces of Hindu culture are gone. Dharma, Moksha, Maya, even Lord Krishna—all of these elements have been filtered out and replaced with more easily processed content and structures.
Step 2: Analyze and Reflect
The next step in the activity aims to identify and overcome cultural limitations. Students compare the actual text of the Bhagavad Gita we read with the summary they created, note omissions and distortions, and reflect on what prevented them from properly processing this information. This leads us to discuss the concept of "schemas," which Bartlett describes as cognitive structures that organize memories and guide the processing of new information. Thus, in my students’ minds, it does not make sense that Lord Krishna orders the desperate protagonist to go to war against his own family because this behavior does not fit with their schema of what a "god" would do. Actually, it does not make sense to them that Lord Krishna is a "god" to begin with (especially since he is pro-war and has an unusual name). To my students, there is either one "God" or no "God." Likewise, if "Dharma" is the object of the protagonist's quest and the center of the plot (what Lord Krishna and his cousins are fighting over), then it has to be the name of a princess—because this is how Western literature works.
Step 3: Extend
To finish the lesson, ask students to brainstorm and debate how other cultural histories and traditions connect to their own cultures. By doing so, students use their own culture to broaden their cultural perspective through discussions that enrich and broaden their schemas. For example, reflection reveals that Greek mythology is all about a pantheon of "gods," and Hanukkah celebrates a military victory. Likewise, religious battles like jihad are not necessarily literal. Students build on their own conceptualizations of religion, history, and metaphor to embrace a broader cultural perspective.
If you try this activity in your classroom, the details and detours in the discussion will obviously depend on your students’ backgrounds. The important, universal truth worth exploring is that cultures communicate. For students to build the education culture of the future, they must have opportunities to investigate how culture shapes their present.