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Children and culture

Working as an assistant curator for a museum, I am in the business of promoting awareness and appreciation of cultural heritage and diversity. Recently, I asked some of my friends if they thought it was important to educate their children about culture. Most replied with an enthusiastic "Absolutely!", but when asked how they would go about it, most drew a blank. It made me think. How would I teach my four year old son about culture? What is culture', anyway? According to David and Julia Jary in The HarperCollins Dictionary of Sociology, "Culture includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behaviour such as law and morality, and systems of belief as well as the arts and gastronomy". In simpler terms, anthropologists and sociologists believe that culture is formed through our way of life. Why is it then important for us to teach' our children about culture? Well, it's because culture is not biologically inherited, like our DNA; we have to learn it, either consciously or subconsciously.

Most of us, however, have modern and hectic lifestyles. Many of us abandon traditional ways in favour of the quick and convenient. Our children (and let's face it, we ourselves) are hooked on the television, the internet and video games. Through our intensifying reliance on technology, we have embraced most of what has become part of a generic and commercialised global culture. Yet, we do live in a multi-cultural society and communication technologies have bridged the gaps and even blurred the boundaries between the world's peoples and cultures. If there was ever a time and a need to start teaching our children the valuable lessons of appreciating their own culture and those of others, it would be now.

As parents, we need to ask ourselves Do we do enough to teach our children about culture? How would we do it? What would be the benefits of doing so? Having done a little background research, I came up with some possible benefits of helping our children to become more aware of their own culture:
It will heighten their self-awareness and self-respect.
It will give them a sense of belonging: to a family, to a community or to a place.
It will help establish their identity and make them feel proud of their own culture.

While it is important to understand and appreciate our own culture, there are also benefits to making our children aware of other cultures, for example:
It will help them learn acceptance and tolerance.
It will cultivate openness

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