Blending Education with Culture

Human  beings are not only born into a physical environment  which  consists  of the earth, water, sky, sound  texture, color, light and so on, but also into a cultural  environment.  this  cultural  environment  consists, in part , of the tools, instruments, building and other  material  objects which  man  has made  out  of  his  physical  environment  for his comfort and use. It consists, also, of the meaning which the knowledge, institutions, social practices, symbolic systems, and all other creations of man. In short, the culture consists of the man -made parts of our environment as contrasted with all the objects and things that would exist even if man did not. If we refer to all   the elements of a cultural system. The culture of a people  includes  all those  artifacts, ideas, social ways, institutions, customs and the like  which  taken in their  totality, constitute  the environment  which  man himself  has made. Therefore, culture includes all aspects of life. the important  points about  culture are that  these things  are shared  by  the groups, that  they  are learned and  are not  biologically inherited modes of behavior, and that they are passed down  from  one generation to the next. There  is a kind of  internal consistency  to culture  and all parts of culture are  tied  into  a whole., which  under  normal  circumstances, makes an integrated and patterned way of life. According to the use   of the term, it is permission able to speak of any individual as a cultured person, regardless of the amount of schooling he has received. A person is cultured in the sense that he has taken on the ways of behaving characteristics of the people with whom he associates with. He is nurtured by the culture. Culture is not merely a set of customs. It is away of life, and cultural values serve as the lodestar to life.

                          The concept of culture is important to a teacher in a school system. Primarily, the concept of culture helps him to understand the purpose of the school. In any society, the school exists for the purpose of inducting the young into the culture. Only as its  young  people  take  on the  customs, traditions, ideas  and other  element  of the culture  can a society continue to  exist. The education of the young in the ways and beliefs of the elders is just as essential to the maintenance of a society as is biological reproduction.  For if each generation had to begin anew to work out ways of satisfying its needs, man’s   development could not raise much above the sub- human level. By  the  process  of passing  on cultural  accumulation from one generation to the next, man  builds  an increasingly  rich environment  for the  nurture  of its offspring. Thus each generation has a better  oppournity  than its  predecessor to advance  itself  to a higher  level  of social  existence. The task of the school  is to assist  in the  process  of passing  on to the new  generation those cultural  elements having  the greatest  promise  of  contributing  to human development. The teacher can educate  only  as he selects the appropriate  elements  of the  culture and uses   them  in such  ways  as to influence  the development  of the individual.