[Exploring Life] Culture may be viewed as a universal tendency for people within stable geographic populations to create sets of beliefs, values and expectations that serve to create a sense of social structure and unity. It may also be that culture is an offspring of the innate human need to belong. Perhaps culture originated as groups of people sharing the same situations and circumstances found it advantageous to solve the problems of survival. In this sense culture may be viewed as an attempt to seek equilibrium within the unavoidable confluence of everyday life. Regardless of its origins, culture serves to shape how we think, how we behave and our sense of entitlement in life.
Culture can also be viewed as a form of confinement since it serves to condition our thoughts, emotions and behaviors, which are codified in language. We now know that our thoughts have a physiological impact on the operation of our brain. The linkage between culture-mind-brain-physiology is fundamental to understanding why we do the things we do.
What is most difficult to accept is the fact that our own cultural patterns are literally unique, and therefore they are not universal. It is this difficulty that human beings have in getting outside their own cultural skins that motivated me to commit my observations and conceptual models to writing. (Hall 1959)
While culture may be a universal organizing theme for humankind, the variations on that theme are not universal. The tacit assumptions within our own culture can serve to limit our perception of the world and how we might choose to live in it. To get outside our own cultural skins in order to view life from new perspectives requires that we first develop an awareness of how the culture we are in conditions our thoughts and beliefs.
The fact is, however, that once people have learned to learn in a given way it is extremely hard for them to learn in any other way… Learning, then, is one of the basic activities of life, and educators might have a better grasp of their art if they would take a leaf out of the book of early pioneers in descriptive linguistics and learn about their subject by studying the acquired context in which other people learn. (Hall 1959)
In chapter three The Vocabulary of Culture Hall describes three basic kinds of learning. Formal Learning is an imposed form of learning by adults on youth. The main idea of formal learning is to instill sets of beliefs in youth that are not questioned or challenged. Hall states that, “Formal patterns are almost always learned when a mistake is made and someone corrects it.” Informal Learning proceeds from the use of a model to encourage imitation. The reasons for behavior encouraged are often invisible, that is, the rules are not visible until one is broken. “Whole clusters of related activities are learned at a time, in many cases without the knowledge that they are being learned at all or that there are patterns or rules governing them.” Technical Learning is closely aligned with training. It represents more of a one-way transmission of an expert’s knowledge to a student in verbal and/or written form. Informal learning captures the essence of the silent language and captures the mercurial side of learning, that is, we learn to emulate thoughts, emotions and behaviors without being aware of it.
Cultural awareness is about developing insight into cultures other than our own. In a more profound sense, it is about developing insight into how our own cultural surround influences our own assumptions, habits of thought, behavioral patterns, emotional reactions, accepted beliefs, and lifestyle. Developing a deeper sense of cultural awareness means that we challenge our own knowledge, beliefs, traditions, and behaviors not with intent to attack our own culture, but to test it against our own experience. To do this we must extend our ability to learn beyond the formal, the informal and the technical so that our own experience embodies the learning environment and our own powers of perception, awareness and attention are the assumption.
