How not to hate the natives Part Four

Perhaps the most frequent complaint I have heard from expats everywhere I have taught (perhaps because I haven’t been lucky enough to live in Holland) in that the locals are insular and therefore (with an impressive leap of logic typical of expat pub conversations) nationalistic and ignorant.

One possible reaction to those feelings is to go on a personal quest to teach everyone in the country you are in some basic facts about the world. There is, however, another approach that will involve slightly less stress and conflict for both teacher and students- and possibly help your relations with the surrounding population as well:

Apart from remembering examples of people back home who are not quite as worldy-wise as you’d like to think your nation is (could Auntie Margaret in Dorking name a single Japanese person since WWII?), it is worth asking a couple of questions to find out if your students’ knowledge is even more based on the local area than it is on the nation, and therefore not really nationalistic at all (just like Auntie Margaret). For example, from kindergarten and primary school in Japan geography is taught starting just down the road and then expanding out from there, and that attitude can stick- but can hardly be called nationalism.

The next stage is to realise that the fact that Auntie Margaret and Senora Lopez your Spanish landlady are interested first in the strange doings of their neighbours, second in the report that the local MacDonalds where they have eaten a couple of times has been relabelling out of date food, third in the dubious doings of politicians they can actually vote for and only finally in the latest setback in a hopeless attempt to sort out Middle East peace again is entirely natural- and here is a woman in a white coat to back me up:

In an experiment that suggests that mice can feel empathy just like you and me (well, like you anyway- the fact that I never cried in ET might make me officially less sensitive than a mouse), Dale J. Langford and crew at McGill University proved that the mice weren’t just reacting with fear because they think it could happen to them too This proof was acheived by showing that the mice reacted more if the mouse something happened to was someone close such as a family member. In other words, the definition of empathy is to feel more for someone close to you than someone far away- something Auntie Margeret could have told you years ago if she hadn’t been too busy telling you not to break the good china.

So, it is in fact the liberal ability to avoid their neighbours so they have more time to send letters through Amnesty International to Sudan, the British ability to care more for foxes in Somerset than the old lady next door who is embarrassed by the fact that she can’t keep her garden tidy anymore and the Dutch ability to be more interested in English 2nd Division football than in the immigrants in their own country that are the unnatural ones. Something being natural doesn’t always make it right of course, but knowing that insularity is natural should at least let us be slightly more realistic in our quests to educate an entire nation.

In case I haven’t persuaded you to give up your Quixotic quest to educate a nation, some more painless ways to bring cultural knowledge into your English language lessons will be coming up soon.

A few more details on the experiment mentioned above available on www.SciAmMind.com, but not too many details, because obviously someone has decided that scientific knowledge should only be available to those that pay…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 5:25 amand is filed under Cultural differences/ cultural training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.