Developing Cultural Awareness and Global Perspective: The World Window Protocol
The afternoon my son Ethan came home from school and asked, with genuine curiosity, why the new student in his class, a boy named Amir who had recently moved from Lebanon, "talked funny and ate weird food," I felt the particular combination of embarrassment and urgency that comes from realizing your child has absorbed cultural narrowness from somewhere, and that somewhere might be you. He was nine years old, sitting at the kitchen table in our suburban Denver home, and his question was not malicious. It was ignorant, which is different. Ignorance is not a moral failing. It is an information gap. And in that moment, I recognized that the information gap in Ethan's understanding of the world was not something that would close on its own. If anything, it would widen, hardening from curiosity into judgment, from "that is different" into "that is wrong," unless we deliberately and systematically exposed him to the vast, varied, and genuinely fascinating diversity of human cultures and perspectives. ...