Cultural Conditioning: Third Meeting With My Conversation Partner

            In our last meeting, I helped Jose edit an essay he is writing for his EIP class. Upon my first reading, I noticed a lot of run-on sentences that I could cut into 3 or 4 separate ones. When I pointed this out, Jose told me that he often heard the same feedback from his teachers, but that it was a difficult habit to break because run-on sentences were perfectly acceptable in Venezuela. This was the first time I even considered that sentence structure would be different cross-culturally.  I guess I should have expected this difference because grammar varies from language to language, but for some reason I assumed punctuation usage and sentence structure was uniform.

            The essay topic was also interesting.  Jose’s class is currently reading a book about World War II, so their assignment is to pick a topic from World War II and write a five-paragraph essay. The moment he told me that his EIP class, which is comprised of people from all over the world, was covering World War II I instantly became interested. I wondered what it would be like to sit in a classroom full of people with drastically different national backgrounds and learn about World War II. History can be interpreted so subjectively that I was interested to see what sort of opinions about the War existed in Jose’s class.  Jose said his teachers were very careful to be neutral when covering the topic in class, so not much controversy existed there, but this led to an interesting conversation about Jose’s opinion of World War II.

            Jose said that World War II was never a prominent subject in his schooling. His teachers covered it briefly in World History, and mainly focused on the nuclear weapon facet. This makes sense because Venezuela was never a direct participant in World War II. The only direct effect the war had on Venezuela was the threat of nuclear weapons. This point of view had never occurred to me. I understood that the motivations and effects of the war were probably viewed contrastingly in different countries, but I never considered the war as merely a segue into learning about nuclear weapons.

This shows how strongly we are conditioned in school to agree with national opinions. In the U.S., the war is taught as a catastrophic life-changing event, because that’s exactly what it was here. I was so conditioned into this point of view in school that I didn’t even realize it was a point of view. I assumed it was truth. As always, Jose cast an interesting outsider’s outlook on my views.