Beth's
Ponderings
I recently read of
a teacher who decided to teach the concept of multiculturalism by having each
student bring to class a potato dish to share with the others. The dish had to have potatoes and they had to
provide a list of all the ingredients.
As I’m sure you can
imagine, each child brought a completely different dish. Many were ethnic dishes that were common to
their particular backgrounds, or dishes that they had been introduced to when
they arrived in Canada . The teacher brought plain old boiled potatoes.
In contrast to the
plain potatoes, the other dishes were a colourful, and flavourful blend, and
highlighted how our cultural differences come together to create something more
when they are all shared together.
Also mentioned in
the story, was the various dietary restrictions some of the students had, and
how they were unable to eat various dishes because of that. There was also mention made about how they
should have been more mindful of the other students when they chose their
dishes.
The reality is no
matter how mindful the students were, or how they tried to accommodate all the
various dietary restrictions, there is no way that every child would have been
able to eat every dish. And the dishes
wouldn’t have been recognizable as what they were to be.
The more we, as a
society, try to include everyone by changing all manner of details in our
institutions, organizations and groups, the more and more we’ll end up
excluding people. We are all so unique
that you can’t expect one set of conditions, however tweaked, to work for
absolutely everyone, in every situation.
The only group that
we can all be included in, without worry, is humanity itself.
Beth
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