Cultural Differences

Cultural Differences

Introduction

Culture is defined as the norm and values that belongs to a society. It is considered as a powerful tool for human survival, it is a range of learned human behavior patterns (Boyd, 2001). It comprises of beliefs, behaviors and objects that are common to a society or belong to a group of people, which includes various societal aspects, such as language, customs, and values and so on. With increased globalization it has become challenging for organizations to manage these culturally diverse group of people. Thus the focus would be to analyze the aspect of differences in culture from teaching perspective (Canino & Jeanne, 2000).

Cultural Relativism

Since the values and beliefs belonging to different cultures vary, thus to distinguish between the right and wrong is also relative to individual within his social context. Often one society may consider one thing to be morally correct however it will be considered as morally incorrect in other culture, this phenomenon is termed as cultural relativism. It illustrates that all cultures as equal in value. Culture diversity may result in conflicting moral belief, yet it must not be considered in terms of right or wrong. All cultures must be studied with neutral perspective as they have legitimate expression of human existence (Ekho, 2000).

It is inappropriate to state that customs and values of other societies are morally inferior to your own. However with development in societies requires progress by modifying through replacing the way of doing things with better ways. Society that pertained in the eighteenth century is different from the one that we have currently. As we have made progress this indicates that present day society is better which has been as a result of trans-cultural judgment which would be impermissible according to culture relativism. Social reforms will also have to be considered as it emphasizes on bringing change in society for improvement and hence it cannot be done under cultural relativism. It is important to condemn certain practices such slavery and anti-Semitism. Although cultural values might be distinguished from each other yet there are a number of aspects that may be common to these cultures. For instance societies may have universal moral values that are; values for distinguishing between evil or bad may similar in different cultures (Pranee, 2007).

Article Summary

Organizations have the challenging task of dealing with culturally diverse group of people. Since the values of different cultures might be distinguished from one another, thus it is important to overcome the problem of cultural diversity in context to teaching. Teachers must acquire the knowledge related to different cultures with relevance to child abuse and differences in culture in childrearing. To maintain discipline teachers use physical punishment for students which is common with low income Hispanic families (Ekho, 2000). It is also a common practice in Vietnamese families to tie their children's ears with door knob. Most of the North-American schools are becoming culturally diverse. Many of the educators highlighted that they only have the capability of understanding their own culture ...