Culture and What It Includes
Culture and What It Includes
What culture is
- An accepted way of life.
- It controls what a school chooses to teach.
- A kind of social glue: the habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking of a group in a place.
Observable facts of a culture
- Dress, food, games, music.
- Child-rearing practices.
- Material products.
- Typical vocations.
- Religious and patriotic rituals.
- Political and social organizations.
When the socio-cultural foundation talks about the setting a school sits in, the key word is culture. Culture is more than festivals and food. It is an accepted way of life, the shared pattern of how a group of people live, and it reaches into the curriculum more than most people notice.
What culture is
At its simplest, a culture is an accepted way of life for a particular group of people in a particular place. It is made up of their characteristic habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking. A useful image is social glue: culture is what holds a group together as a recognisable people, giving them a shared sense of how things are normally done.
For curriculum, the crucial point is that culture controls what a school chooses to teach. A society teaches what its culture values and treats as worth passing on. Two schools serving two different cultures will make different choices about content, not because one is right and the other wrong, but because each reflects its own way of life.
An accepted way of life that acts as social glue
It is the shared habits, attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking of a group in a place. For curriculum, it matters because culture controls what a school chooses to teach.
The observable facts of a culture
Culture can sound abstract, but much of it is visible. It shows up in an array of observable facts, the concrete things you can see and point to in a community:
- Dress, food, games, and music: the everyday surface of how people live.
- Child-rearing practices: how a society raises its young.
- Material products: the things a culture makes and uses.
- Typical vocations: the kinds of work people commonly do.
- Religious and patriotic rituals: the shared ceremonies that mark belonging.
- Political and social organizations: how a society arranges and governs itself.
These observable facts are the raw evidence a developer reads when studying the culture a school serves. They reveal what a community values and how it lives, which in turn points to what its curriculum should attend to. A curriculum built without looking at them risks teaching for a society that does not exist.
Dress and food, child-rearing practices, and typical vocations
The fuller set also includes material products, religious and patriotic rituals, and political and social organizations. These visible facts are the evidence a developer reads about a community.
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