Parte del mio lavoro quotidiano is to promote at the elementary and middle schools creative educational workshops name to which the cooperative work.
In particular, projects that are personally propose that the so-called laboratories 'intercultural', an adjective now entered the everyday language of the school environment that is Italian to deal with children who come from around the world without being prepared to understand to fund the different points of view and exploit them properly.
I must say that among the teachers I have met many people still sensitive and genuinely interested in offering students the possibility of new knowledge and stimulate their curiosity to meet the cultures 'Other'.
Moreover, it is no longer possible to ignore part of an increasingly interconnected world, where the choices of those who live far from us about us closely and, conversely, our willingness to become aware of our behavior in terms of environment, politics and culture have an impact in the short and long term in the rest of the world.
I think it is right now more than ever realize how we are already consisting of a mix between so-called 'Italian culture' and the cultures of those living-I-lived beside us.
We can do better and look more closely at our neighbor.
very interesting and I must say, even fun, reflections who made the ' American anthropologist Ralph Linton in 1937 about naive and unaware of the idea that the average American has its own culture: "The average American wakes up in a bed built to a design which originated in neighboring East. He pulled back the sheets and blankets that can be cotton, plant native to India, or flax, a plant native to the Near East, or sheep's wool, animal originally domesticated in the Near East, or silk, which use was discovered in China. All these materials have been invented yarns and fabrics according to procedures in the Near East. He puts on his moccasins invented by Indians in the wooded districts of the east, and goes to the bathroom, whose accessories are a mix of European and American inventions, both of recent date. Takes off his pajamas, a garment invented in India, and washes with soap invented by the ancient Gauls. Then he shaves, a masochistic rite which seems to be derived from the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians.
Back in the bedroom, took his clothes from a chair to the model was developed in southern and dresses. She wears garments whose form originally derived from the leather-clad nomads from the steppes of Asia, puts on shoes made of leather, dyed by a process invented in ancient Egypt, cut according to a model derived from the classical civilizations of the Mediterranean and begins around neck a brightly colored strip that is a surviving vestige of the shawls that the Croats were held on the shoulders of the seventeenth century [...]
Going to breakfast stops to buy a newspaper, paying with currencies which are an ancient Lydian invention. At the restaurant ... his plate is made of a type of pottery invented in China, and his knife is of steel, an alloy made for the first time in southern India, the origins of medieval Italian fork, spoon is derived from ' Roman original. It takes its coffee, Abyssinian plant, with cream and sugar. Both the idea of \u200b\u200bbreeding cows to milk them originated in the Near East, while sugar was extracted in India for the first time. After the fruit and coffee, eat waffles, cakes, according to a Scandinavian technique, wheat, a native of Asia Minor [...]
When our friend has finished eating, leans back in his chair and smokes, second habit of the Indians of America, consuming the plant domesticated in Brazil or smoking a pipe, derived from the Indians of Virginia, or a cigarette, derived from Mexico. It can also smoke a cigar, transmitted to us from the West Indies, through Spain. While smoking reads the news of the day, printed in characters invented by the ancient Semites upon a material invented in China and by a process invented in Germany. While reading the accounts of the problems which trouble abroad, if it is a good conservative citizen, an Indo-European language, thank a Hebrew deity to have done it one hundred percent American. "(From Marco Aime, excesses of culture, Einaudi 2004)
