LETTER: Letters miss crux of cultural education

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by Mikael Thompson

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To the editor:

Irphan Gaslightwala ("Ignorance begets racism," Thresher , Feb. 9) and Lisa De La Torre ("Desire to learn about own culture should not be perceived as ignorance, racism," Thresher , Feb. 16) have both written letters about the places of Western and non-Western cultures in education at Rice.

I take particular exception to De La Torre's letter. She writes that "it is most rational to choose to learn about the history of the culture that will be most useful in your day-to-day living -- that of the country in which you live."

She argues, then, that because students at Rice live in a Western society, they must study Western culture to get ahead.

In other words, the purpose of a university education is to make money, and lots of it, and to hell with broad understanding and deep learning. Even on these terms, her argument is probably false.

The university is an institution for teaching critical thought and promoting a rational understanding of the world, not merely an advanced trade school.

The humanities in particular must be committed to examining all human experience, not just the experience of the people in one's own society. You cannot truly understand something without understanding what it isn't.

I am not opposed to making money or to capitalism in general; far from it. But is making money the purpose of education?

No, no more than it should be the purpose of marriage. De La Torre should be grateful for the opportunities Rice offers her, whether or not she seizes them.

However, I hasten to add that such education should be based on rationally examining ideas, not uncritically staring at everyone's navel but one's own.

Gaslightwala mentions the contributions of Asian culture to the world, for example.

But cultures are not indivisible primaries. Does Gaslightwala embrace all of Indian culture uncritical-ly, even to the centuries of religious warfare there?

I am sure he does not. Neither do I celebrate the cruel enslavement of Africans.

Education must see people as individuals, for only individuals can hold ideas. Groups cannot.

Otherwise, a putative education is really indoctrination, the dreary struggle to supplant one unthinking passion with another. Either we are educated to understand the past, or we will be swallowed up by old struggles revived.

And it is in this that American education is such a failure.

There is no institution in American society more committed to multiculturalism than public education, despite the gloss given it by the Reagan and Bush administrations.

However, despite Gaslightwala's assertions, American schools already teach about other cultures just as anti-conceptually and vainly as they teach every other subject.

I was exposed to the Han Dynasty, the Moghul Empire and the cultures of West Africa in social studies in elementary school; I even remember being shown a film on the life of Gautama Buddha. In third grade in Texas, no less!

However, to be tossed an unintegrated body of facts is not to receive an education.

But would it have been better only about the West?

Rather, both alternatives are equally unsavory: Neither approach is concerned with intellectual development but with emotional adjustment.

Neither approach leads to critical thought, but both lead to an unthinking acceptance of the world as it is.

Mikael Thompson

Jones '98

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 1, 1996 issue.

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