The downside of pride

America has an attitude problem when it comes to how we view our place in the world. When we are very young, we learn that this country is unique because we are free. Here, we can grow up to be anything, to go anywhere, and to achieve our wildest dreams. This is true, to an extent — sadly, most of us will never be astronauts or rock stars — but instilling an attitude of nationalistic pride and patriotism creates some issues that can indefinitely remain invisible to the average American unless they are pointed out by an outside observer.

To be clear, saying that America has certain image issues is not equivalent to disparaging the country. The very constitution of the country gives me the right, by law, to criticize our country and our culture. This is a wonderful privilege that we enjoy because of the nature of being citizens in a free state. So, wait a second before firing off an angry reply; I promise this is all going somewhere.

There's nothing wrong with believing that America is the greatest country on Earth. The issue is instilling that value in our children when they are very young but also not teaching them about the perspectives, languages and worldviews of other countries. Yes, while America may be powerful, vast and free, we have a glaring cultural problem: we are more ethnocentric than almost any other country in the world.

Ethnocentrism is a social science term that doesn't show up a lot in general high school textbooks, but is essentially defined as believing that your country, culture, language, worldview and way of doing things is the best. All people and civilizations are guilty of ethnocentrism to a certain degree — after all, we wouldn't build our cities and societies the way we do if we didn't think they were the best! However, when taken too far ethnocentrism becomes problematic because it can make us blind to other ways of existing as human beings on this planet. Worse still, it can make us judge other cultures as being inherently inferior than our own because they have customs that we view as strange, or use a level of technology that we consider to be lesser than our own.

The truth, though, is that there is no one "right" way to do things. As societies evolve culturally over time, they take on characteristics that are useful to surviving in their particular society. It can be thought of as a sort of cultural natural selection: things that work well remain, while things that create social tension, result in death or disease, or somehow inhibit reproduction are phased out. The most important thing to consider is that each person is influenced by cultural values on many different levels, and these values depend on cultural context and timing. In other words, while we all like to believe that we are moral people, what is considered moral is a product of our cultural and our social norms. Past societies that participated in things that we now censure, such as slavery, were not intentionally acting in a manner that they believed was immoral. They adjusted their morals based on cultural values. That is the danger of ethnocentrism: almost anything can be justified if society agrees that it is acceptable.

So, as a result of our ethnocentrism, we have failed to adequately educate our children about other cultures, and more importantly we have failed to instruct them in the use of languages other than English. Because we operate under the principle that English is the "best" language, we neglect to mandate language learning in public schools. This is a huge issue, and it does a great disservice to Americans in general. Yes, foreign language is taught as an elective in high school, but properly learning a second or third language is a process that takes years and is best begun early in life. While adults can learn additional languages, getting a head start as children is a massive advantage, as any college student slogging through introductory Spanish or French can tell you.

Why language matters

I first set foot in a Spanish language classroom just over a year ago. At the time, I had no idea what to expect. Would we be hunched over our textbooks, reciting "¿Dónde está el baño?" over and over again? I figured that, as adults, truly grasping the language would be beyond our abilities. I was wrong. Not only is it possible to learn a second language, it is incredibly rewarding and can expand a person's horizons greatly. It reveals the greatest flaw that Americans have when it comes to expressing ourselves: when you only speak English, you can only envision and imagine things from an English point of view. The very boundaries of our ability to comprehend the world around us are determined by the limits of our language. Learning a second language doesn't just mean learning to say English phrases in another language. It means learning to think about the world in a different way. There are some things that we can't easily say in English, but that come naturally to other languages.

For example, in Spanish there are multiple verbs that mean "to be." The most common of these are the verbs ser and estar. Without going into tedious detail, ser deals with things that are inherent or have always existed: the place you were born, gender, family members, and so forth. Estar deals with things that exist but change over time: location, emotional states, and other things of a transient nature. In English, there is no distinction between states of being. There is no stratification of "being-ness." This is an important distinction, because it means that in English we have no way to change the mode or tone of "being." The phrases "I am at the store" and "I was born in Ohio" hold equal weight. While this may seem of little consequence, to a Spanish speaker the place that you are born holds a more permanent and significant nature than the place you are shopping. The Spanish verb structure takes note of the fleeting nature of life. They acknowledge that we are ephemeral by the very structure of their language. I think that there is something profound in that.

Languages aren't just useful because they enable us to communicate with a greater number of people, although that is certainly an advantage to learning them. They are useful because they allow us to understand and embrace worldviews that we have never even considered in the past. They make us smarter. Knowing how to say something in five languages is not only intellectually impressive, it also means that you understand that subject on a very deep level. You have scoured it, processed it, and mentally manipulated it until it becomes second nature. It may sound strange, but language really does matter, and it is truly a shame that we aren't mandating a foreign language or two in our public schools.

What we can do

America is a country that is founded on pride. We exist because at one point our fore fathers (and mothers!) believed that they had a better system, and they wanted to implement it. The complex series of events that followed is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that Americans these days have a tendency to place themselves at the center of the globe, so to speak. Even the word we call ourselves — American — is ethnocentric. There are two American continents comprised of many different countries. We are the United States — but we are not America in its entirety.

So, yes, we exist because we had a vision and we set out to achieve it — but that came at the cost of forgetting the validity of other countries. This is not as much of an issue in Europe or South America, where countries are packed in tightly, but we in the mainland are bordered by only two other countries, and little is said about them in traditional public education. People from the United States, as a whole, need better training in understanding and appreciating the world outside of our borders. I believe that training should start at a young age, and should include a comprehensive linguistic component. Not only would it broaden the thinking of our nation's children, it would change the way the rest of the world views us. We would be seen as more egalitarian, more worldly and more mature. It would foster a sense of a worldwide community in our children, which would combat xenophobia, ethnocentrism and racism. It would provide a better quality of life for our country in general.

We are a country founded on the idea that anyone can come and contribute, regardless of their birth country, language, religion or political beliefs. This is a wonderful concept, but we fail to meet people from other countries even halfway. We expect them to learn our language and adopt our beliefs and customs, without ever stopping to consider whether ours are actually better in the first place. This, I think, is among the most serious social ailments that are affecting us today, and it is unlikely to change unless we acknowledge the importance of being culturally and linguistically literate on a global level.