THE WOLF AND THE TURTLE: AMERICAN OMNIPREDATORIAL AND CHINESE CIVILIZATIONAL-PROTECTIONIST TENDENCIES IN THE BICULTURAL CLASSROOM

Abstract

Despite setbacks to global commerce and communication over the last three years, the United States and China remain closely bound in the areas of science, technology, and commerce. Even if their economies decouple, such is likely to take years. In the meantime, academic exchange will continue. So long as this is the case, effective cross-cultural education is bound to be essential to the peace and welfare of the American and Chinese peoples. At the heart of effective education is understanding, both of the academic content being taught and the lens through which students process instruction and student/teacher and student/student interaction. This is a matter of culture. Existing theories of American and Chinese cultural differences focus on opposing family and community values and on the individualism/collectivism spectrum. None of these theories are inherently wrong, yet they are deficient in that they fail to account for the most fundamental dissimilarity: that between the inherently slow-moving, security-oriented, and cautious nature of Chinese culture (the turtle) and the fast-moving, aggressive, predatorial and growth-oriented nature of American culture (the wolf). The discourse du jour of colonialism and anticolonialism proves no better, providing an inadequate means of analysis in that it only allows for the comparison of colonizer and colonized. Herein, we take a different tack and consider the previously unnamed and not fully recognized omnipredatorial impulse of American culture—that which drives American educational, media, and corporate organizations to expand and consume without restriction or regard for ethnicity, national background, heritage, or practicality. It is this organic, instinctive, and subconscious impulse that causes American institutions to strive for a unification of all cultures under a single banner that absorbs all that is useful from other peoples, discards all the rest, and effectively Americanizes everything and everyone with which it interacts. The Chinese have no comparable impulse at the global scale, being content to engage in commerce with a focus on practical, regional geopolitics. But they are intensively protective of their culture and civilization, which stands to frustrate the American instinct and complicate interaction between the nations. How these competing and conflicting behavioural patterns developed and how they function in the classroom are matters worthy of discussion and consideration. By developing and expanding upon the concept of the omnipredatorial impulse, contrasting it to China’s unexpansive culture, and assessing their respective influence on American and Chinese educational mindsets, this research will develop a more effective model of intercultural classroom dynamics.

Article visualizations: