Culture and Society
Culture and Society
What culture is
- The fabric of ideas, beliefs, skills, tools, customs, and institutions a person is born into.
- The part of a person’s environment that people themselves have made.
What a society is
- A group who think of themselves as a distinct unit, bound by shared loyalties and sentiments.
- Not a mere collection of individuals.
The relationship
- No society without a culture, and no culture without a society, yet they are not identical.
- A person’s basic personality is shaped by the culture they grow up in.
The words culture and society are used so loosely that they blur together. For curriculum work they need to be kept apart, because a curriculum passes on a culture to the members of a society, and you cannot describe that job clearly while the two terms are tangled.
What culture is
Culture is the whole fabric of a people’s life. It is made of their ideas and ideals, their beliefs, skills, tools, aesthetics, objects, customs, ways of thinking, and the institutions into which each member of the society is born. It shows up in the way people make a living, the games they play, the stories they tell, the heroes they admire, the music they play, the way they raise their children, how families are organized, how they travel and communicate, and countless other things.
A useful way to fix the idea: culture is the part of a person’s environment that people themselves have made or created. The river is not culture; the bridge across it is. Culture is the human-made world a person is born into and learns to live in.
The made fabric of a people’s life: ideas, beliefs, skills, tools, customs, institutions
It is the part of a person’s environment that people themselves created, showing in how they make a living, the stories they tell, how they raise children, and much more.
What a society is, and how it differs from culture
A society is not the same thing as a culture. A society is a group of organized individuals who think of themselves as a distinct group. The key word is distinct: a society is not a mere collection of individuals who happen to be in one place, because in a mere collection the individuals do not see themselves as members of a single social unit.
What turns a collection into a society is something held in common: a set of loyalties and sentiments strong enough that, in certain circumstances, an individual will put the group’s good above their own, even sacrifice for it. Those common loyalties are part of a culture. So the two are bound together. Without a culture there could be no society, and without a society there could be no culture.
Yet they are not identical. The difference is clean once stated: a society is composed of people, while a culture consists of the things those people have learned to do, believe, value, and enjoy over the course of their history.
| Term | What it is |
|---|---|
| Society | The people, who see themselves as a distinct group |
| Culture | The things those people have learned to do, believe, and value |
Because culture is learned and historical, it varies. It differs from one society to another, and it differs within the same society if a long enough span of time is allowed. What people do, believe, and value in one place is not what they do, believe, and value in another, or in the same place a century later.
Shared loyalties and sentiments, strong enough to put the group first
A society is a group who see themselves as a distinct unit. The common loyalties that bind them are part of a culture, which is why the two cannot exist without each other.
How culture passes to the young, and shapes them
Every society faces the same task: inducting its immature members into the culture. How it does so depends on the society. In simpler societies, the family does most of the work, and learning is informal, picked up by interacting with adults in daily activities. In literate societies, instruction in the group’s ways becomes partly a specialized process, and a school is created with the responsibility for teaching certain things.
This is where curriculum enters. A sequence of potential experiences is set up in the school to discipline children and young people in the group’s ways of thinking and acting, and that set of experiences is what is called the curriculum. So the curriculum is always, in every society, a reflection of what people think, feel, believe, and do.
Culture does not only shape the curriculum; it shapes the person. What a particular individual does, believes, and how they react to the world depends on the culture they grow up in. The basic personality structure of a person is shaped by the culture into which they are born and grow to maturity. This is why social diagnosis matters so much: in reading the culture, a developer is reading the very thing that forms the learners.
A person’s basic personality is shaped by the culture they grow up in
What someone does, believes, and how they react depends on their culture. Since culture forms the learner, reading the culture is central to social diagnosis for curriculum.
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