Running head: UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD BETTER

Understanding the World Better

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UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD BETTER

At birth, when a person has not mastered a single aspect of culture of the community they
have been born into, all human beings tend to be the same. This ceases to be the case moments
after birth because a child immediately begins to respond and adjust to the components of their
immediate environment. According to Liddicoat and Scarino (2013), Humans are not born with a
culture, because culture is a product of perceptions which start to develop as a child gets to
understand the meaning of things around him/her. A strong emotional attachment develops
between the child and the social environment they exist and grow in. when a child grows up in
the same social environment, he/she develops within a thin cultural spectrum. This leads him/her
to conform only to their culture, and not adequately understand that there is a much bigger
cultural world outside of their own (Oakes et al., 2015). This, basically, is how cultural
prejudices develop, especially where one tries to understand the realities about the broader sense
of global culture, in which case they have to remove the lens which enables them to perceive
only their own cultural world.
Cultural prejudice is a situation where an individual constantly makes reference to their
own culture whenever they have to think about the cultures of the many small worlds outside of
their own. In this situation, one tends to perceive their own culture as the standard culture against
which many other cultures are perceived (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). Oftentimes, people tend to
draw wrong judgments about other cultures because they perceived them within a rigid construct,
even where no effective comparison can be drawn between his/her culture and the one they are
trying to understand. Largely, the differences between people of the world are equal to the
differences in their cultural content. According to Oakes et al (2015), whenever the world rises
up against itself, in a world war situation, for instance, the motivation is to strongly advance and
defend different cultural positions that exist among people from different parts of the world.

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD BETTER

Ideally, the world should be understood against a broad spectrum of culture. This can be
achieved when children grow up not locked up within rigid cultural perceptions. They should
grow up when they are a bit more open to the world outside of their own, the cultural gaps
between them tend to close, and then they are able to reach out to each other with much more
ease (Oakes et al., 2015). This is the surest way of getting people to draw closer to each other,
and to perceive themselves as global citizens. This way, humans get to break the chains that lock
them within micro-cultural worlds. Breaking the boundaries between the many micro-cultural
worlds is but the only step towards uniting the world whose strength, and not weakness, should
be defined by the cultural diversity. This way of understanding the world is better because it
helps forge cohesive relationship among people who are similar, and yet so different. It helps
people to understand that, in reality, they are closer to each other than the differences in their
cultures makes them feel.

UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD BETTER

References
Liddicoat, A. J., & Scarino, A. (2013). Intercultural language teaching and learning. John Wiley
& Sons.
Oakes, J., Lipton, M., Anderson, L., & Stillman, J. (2015). Teaching to change the world.
Routledge.