How do we educate ourselves about our culture?

Throughout the course we have been examining different indices that affect our daily lives. Today, I am going to talk education and discuss how people educate themselves about their culture. As we discussed in class, Panama is a country with a high power distance dimension. This means that students tend to develop dependence to their teachers and expect for the teacher to teach them how to do things in life. In the other hand, education in the United States is more of a low power distance culture. I experienced that in the US you can actually speak up what’s on your mind or contradict what the teacher says.

In Panama, education it is very similar to the United States. I had the opportunity to go to an American school here in Panama. For me, it was very similar when it came to academic stuff. Differences that caught my attention were that students in the United States are mostly independent, they tend to self-teach themselves about things, usually speak up in class without having the teacher inviting them into the discussion and they could contradict the teacher’s point of view without being punished or something. In Panama, it is more about doing what the teacher says or you were thrown out of the class. Panamanian students expect the teacher to give them permission to speak up in class; otherwise they would only listen to the instructor. Also, respect for teachers is also shown outside of the classroom. I can recognize, that Panamanians are more dependable on people with more authority. We usually just follow what our boss or leader say without questioning. Of course, this doesn’t means that we ignorant or anything in particular, but our culture has taught us that you always have to respect and not contradict your boss or in this case teacher. If you do contradict, this will have to take place in a private meeting where the person with more power is not publicly embarrassed.

Another way Panamanians tend to learn about their culture is at home. Since we are more of a collectivistic culture, it is obvious that we like to spend more time together than apart from people. Families tend to get to together on holidays and that is how we learn some traditional things about our culture as well. At home, in dinners or lunches we learn our manners and other values that are not taught at school.

How we educate ourselves about our own culture may be different on how people from other cultures educate themselves about their culture. This means that it doesn’t matter how people from different cultures educate themselves about their traditions as long they do it. Even though, I would prefer to have had the opportunity to grow up in a culture where you can speak up your mind, I think that sometimes it gets out of hand and then I realize that I feel more comfortable with the way I’ve been raised. As I said before, it doesn’t matter how you learn about your culture as long as you are always learning about it because your culture is a big part of you as an individual and it is important to keep your culture in mind no matter where you go.