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Getting to No

Cultural understanding does not necessarily mean justification, writes George Walker

Contributions to the most recent issues of International School have revealed interesting differences of opinion concerning the value of the abbreviation TCK. Third Culture Kid – the label of students who belong neither to the culture of their passport nor to the culture of their country of residence – no longer seems to describe the increasing complexity of international family relationships in the 21st century. Where there is complete agreement, however, is in recognising cultural understanding to be the bedrock of international education. National schools may take it for granted (unwisely, since it is a rare school in today’s global village that is monocultural) but international schools are required to respond on a daily basis to the challenges posed by their multicultural students, teachers and parents.

Our culture shapes our identity and determines our relationship with the external world. According to Nobel laureate, poet and critic T S Eliot, culture is quite simply ‘that which makes life worth living’ and it follows logically that the prime purpose of education is to contribute to building a shared culture that brings meaning to the lives of the nation’s citizens, a sense of belonging and a striving for the best of human thought and action. If only it were that simple! Eliot was writing seventy years ago in the United Kingdom when his vision of a homogeneous culture, founded on a shared language and religion and driven by the unifying experience of the Second World War, was a viable proposition. Mass migration has changed the scene and today the maps of nation states rarely define discrete cultural groupings, making the study and management of intercultural relationships a prime factor in international education. Schools must help their students to understand what is meant by culture and why it is important as the citizen’s experience of society’s most precious values: justice, forgiveness, loyalty, honesty, gender relationships, power structures and so on. A multicultural school will have the benefit of human resources in situ but every school has access to the vicarious experience of literature, sometimes from the most surprising sources.

For example, anyone doubting the powerful influence of culture should read the chapter entitled Dulce Domum in Kenneth Grahame’s classic anthropomorphic tale The Wind in the Willows. The conservative, blinkered Mole, exhausted after a long wintery hike with his new friend the Water Rat, suddenly gets the scent of the old home that he has abandoned months earlier for a different and more exciting lifestyle. The memory of everything that he has left behind, not just his home but his entire way of life, comes flooding back to overwhelm him, ‘his heart torn asunder and a big sob gathering, gathering, somewhere low down inside him’. Meanwhile Ratty, who belongs to a very different, buccaneering, entrepreneurial culture, is reluctant to stop and becomes impatient to reach his own home before nightfall. However, he is sensitive enough to understand Mole’s acute distress, changes his mind and joins the search for evidence of the ordered, comfortable régime to which Mole once belonged. It must be one of the most moving passages in English literature.

This cultural clash has a positive outcome; Ratty eventually realises he has struck a sensitive nerve; he is able to imagine himself in the Mole’s situation and, in any case, he is intrigued to learn more about his new friend’s earlier life. Sensitivity, empathy and curiosity are three clues to cultural understanding, the ingredients of tolerance. But what if Ratty had decided not to hang around? After all, it had started to snow again and he was unsure of the way home. His offer of a compromise (returning the following day) has been rejected by Mole. Surely the right decision was to press on. Does Ratty lack the courage to say ‘no’? I am reminded of the alumnus in Geneva who told me how much he had benefited from his education at the International School. But he complained that he had left the school ‘carrying a burden of tolerance’; no one had told him how to draw a red line, how to identify the intolerable. The problem is not new. The sixteenth century French essayist Michel de Montaigne struggled with the practice of cannibalism, newly reported from Brazil. What should be the reaction of ‘civilised Europeans’ to a barbaric practice of ‘uncivilised savages’ when it forms part of that

Mary Hayden and Jeff Thompson Editors Jonathan Barnes Editorial Director James Rudge Production Director Alex Sharratt Managing Director

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