| Review | Class/Internet Activities | Summary | Homework | All People Smile... |
1. List as many of the seven customary behaviors in China as you remember.
2. Which among the seven customary behaviors in China which if ignored will make you into a sort of "social fool.?"
| 1. | Listen and respond to the European Country Team Report. |
| 2. | Watch excerpts from the video Conspiracy, and share your evaluation of the argument as to whether racial supremacy is preferable to cultural diversity for mankind. |
| 3. | Optional Activity: Consider watching excerpts from Shindler's List, or use the Internet to visit Dachau, Buchenwald, or Mauthausen Concentration Camps. |
1. Listen to and then respond to the European Country Report. Point out those man-made objective elements of culture you have seen, and also those man-made ideas or institutions by which European people characterize themselves.
2. Watch excerpts from the video Conspiracy. Use the video as a means of explaining why German officers put forth a final solution to the Jewish problem. Then consider their action in light of the statement made by Margaret Meade and take your own position as to the attitudes held by Hitler and by Meade on the issues of racial and ethnic superiority.
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"If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with will power."
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From Margaret Meade's Introduction to New Lives for Old: "With Nazism the immediate threat, it became important to explore very thoroughly just how individuals, born into a particular society, became members of its culture regardless of their initial racial inheritance or the culture in which their ancestors had lived. Unless we could spell out, step by step, how a human baby, capable of learning any culture, learned completely to be a member of one culture, the racist myth, with its dangerously appealing and glib generalizations, its easy reliance upon comforts, of physical similarity, its irresponsible disposal of three-quarters of the world, might prevail." (quote taken from page 99 - 100, Margaret Meade by Jacqueline Ludel, professor of biology and psychology at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina) |
Photo credit: Franz Amicale Collection, USHMM Photo
Archives
Date: Jul 1941
Mauthausen Concentration Camp oven and crematorium chimney outside Austrian town of the same name
(About 195,000 prisoners were reportedly put through Mauthausen's stone quarry and these ultimate ends to their human experience, between 1939 and 1945.)
2B. For a more positive cross-cultural experience, Challenge to America compares educational systems in Germany, the United States, and Japan. The video may cause you to feel that the United States is behind both major competitors in some respects.
I just got off the phone with a man who asked, "How do I
know which plane to get on?" I asked him what exactly he meant, which he
replied, "I was told my flight number is 823, but none of these darn planes
have numbers on them."
crosscultural.com
1. Your class has selected countries from each of the major populated continents and reported on their culture. Such research is good evidence of the diversity of peoples who inhabit our planet. In Part Three of this course we strive to see the world from our own national perspective again. But we also strive to share the diversity of experience which each class members possesses as the result of significant experiences learned while growing up in specific family settings.
2. Though German and Japanese cultures have admirable achievements as the result of their education systems, each culture has extracted a price from the peoples it is designed to serve. Margaret Meade was one who saw danger in a homogeneous world culture.
3. Those of you who have watched Shindler's List remember the scene in which the concentration camp commandant is randomly shooting prisoner's from his porch while a Jewish servant is preparing his meal. At Mauthausen (pictured above), it is reported that the camp commandant permitted his eleven-year-old son to do the same. You can find a photograph of the camp commandant on the walls surrounding Mauthausen, built by its inhabitants, by visiting Mauthausen on the Internet. Alternatively, you can see a kind of re-enactment of that historical reality by watching Schindler's List.
1. Read Chapter Twenty-Three "Coping Styles Among German and Israeli Adolescents " pages 122-125 in Cross-Cultural Perspectives in America. Answer the following questions in your notebook:
| 1. | How do German and Israeli youths differ in their approach to solving problems? (Be specific) |
| 2. | What other historical cultural factors might influence how a group of people reacts to stress? How similar are American adolescents to these two groups studied by Seiffge-Krenke and Shulman? |
2. Read Chapter VI "Parents, Children and Achievement " pages 51-62 in And Keep Your Powder Dry. Answer the following questions in your notebook:
| 3. | When we ask ourselves how babies become American, we are asking how in American language, songs, attitudes toward politics and religion, jokes, and stories about our universe created by a diverse immigrant citizenry create a pattern. Describe a pattern (of song, humor, attitude, or stories about beliefs) reinforced in you personally by your parents. (pages 51-53) |
| 4. | In old society (in Europe) extended family is still important. But in America - two parents provide the primary anchor for most children. Parents typically live in homes by themselves, and grandparents live at a distance. How many of these characteristics describe your own family? (pages 53-54) |
| 5. | What uncertainties about life do American mothers convey to their offspring? (pages 55-57) |
| 6. | Describe the emergence of the pattern in which each child in America learns about the importance of success and achievement. (pages 56-60) |
| 7. | Do teachers in America reinforce the attitudes for "necessary success" in America according to Margaret Meade, and if so, how is this done? (pages 60-65) |
webofculture.com
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Customary Behaviors (Other than my own)
Customary Behaviors (Other than my own)
Has Your Travel Agent Told You?A woman called and
said, "I need to fly to Pepsi-Cola on one of those computer planes." I
asked if she meant to fly to Pensacola on a commuter plane. She said,
"Yeah, whatever." "All people smile in the same language" ---- Unknown
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"All people smile in the same language" ---- Unknown
