Getting it “Right”: Respect and Understanding across Cultural Difference
By Roy Sheldon, Hackley Modern Languages (Chinese) and History Teacher
What country had the world’s largest economy and largest reserves in silver in the early 1800s and today is poised again to have the largest gross domestic product in the world and foreign exchange reserves? What country expects to be the world’s dominant power by 2030 in all areas of artificial intelligence? What country is now largest market for automobiles and cell phones, to name a few of many products. What country is challenging the United States’ 70-year naval dominance in the Pacific? By now you know the answer to all of these questions: China.
For anyone in school from the 1950s to 1990s, the United States was the unquestioned leader on the global stage. Its educational institutions were the envy of the world, along with its manufacturing and engineering prowess, market power and service industries. The military power and reach of the United States were a reliable given, despite setbacks in Vietnam and other parts of the world. In the 1990s, Japan began to flex its manufacturing and financial muscle but it was short lived and the United States continued its position as the global player on world stage.
Meanwhile, however, a huge population of the world was largely ignored and dismissed while it started to grow its economy in 1978, after decades of stagnation and setbacks. Year over year, its economy grew at a rate of about 10% or more per year while the rest of the world, including the United States, grew in the low single digits. Misconceptions, as well as regional and historical ignorance, governed our policies toward China and the region until it was clear, by the early 2000s, that China could and would challenge the United States leadership and influence around the world.
This is not a cause for despair or panic. It is, however, cause to re-calibrate our understanding and respect of cultures and regions beyond our immediate borders and open our thinking to working within a much wider community than we have had to recognize during the past 60 or more years as a country.
To this end, Hackley is a leading change agent in creating a learning environment that will move our students, teachers, staff and families into new perspectives of the world and out of our comfort zones, breaking down barriers and assumptions, and replacing them with respect, understanding and a sense of responsibility for the greater global community. Hackley continues to expand its program offerings, such as the introduction of Chinese language and culture studies in 2007, to prepare students for a different future than that past faced by earlier generations. It has created programs that expose our students to the global diversity that they will be working in when they graduate.
Programs such as our Round Square initiatives, Casten trips and language immersion trips are now annual mainstays of our school and are flowing down to the lower grades. Our focus on 2nd language acquisition and cultural understanding, starting in the Lower School and extending through our AP courses in the Upper School underline the critical importance of language and culture awareness to better understand and successfully work on the global stage, moving away from a zero sum game mentality to win-win scenarios for all participants at the table.
A recent issue of The Economist had as its headline, “How the West Got China Wrong.” From my perspective, as both a resident of China for more than a decade and a “China watcher” for forty years, I can provide plenty of reasons “how.” However, I am more interested in a headline proclaiming how to get it “right.” The potential to find such solutions is one of the main reasons that drew me to Hackley to working as both a Middle School history and Chinese language teacher. I am confident that our graduates will be better positioned than their predecessors to navigate the appropriate policies and strategies based on respect and an understanding of varying backgrounds that will be necessary to work through challenges and opportunities of this rapidly changing world.
