Illuminata, surely the point is that if a culture is to be passed onto the children, it has to be done by the adults of that culture? The point that seems to be raised is simply that if adults don't pass on their cultural traditions to their children, no-one else is going to do it for them. Teachers exist to teach facts and methods and to encourage children to think for themselves, not to indoctrinate them with a cultural background.

Taking the "mixed salad vs. melting-pot" idea of cultural mixing, which one do you prefer? Pass on your cultural heritage to your kids, and they'll understand the references made by you, your friends and your culture's literary and artistic heritage. If you don't, they'll assimilate something from their friends at school, and your individual cultural distinctness will be lost - both the legacy of your broader culture (church on Sundays, etc), and the detail of your family culture (from my mum, "everyone have a go stirring the Xmas cake and make a wish"). Whether you think this is good or bad is up to you - I make no judgements on this, I'm simply stating the fact.

And you do have to realise that a culture is pretty much mutually exclusive. You can certainly appreciate different cultures, but it's difficult to be a part of more than one, simply because it's taken you your entire life up to that point to learn that one culture, and that's a hell of a lot to relearn! You can't try to teach your kids all the good points of all the different cultures because they won't (or rather physically can't in the time available) learn the detail, and the detail's what makes you a _part_ of the culture rather than just an observer, as Penny demonstrated in the very first post. There's the classic immigrant problem of the children born in the new country learning conflicting cultures and not really fitting into either.

But if you want to pass on your culture and you happen to be an "Anglo", then this requires elements such as "Three blind mice", Christmas trees, Greek myths, Shakespeare and the Sistine Chapel; if you're of Japanese ancestry, it'll be the tea ceremony, calligraphy and changing your shoes; and so the list goes on. If you're not passing this kind of stuff on, then your child will no longer fully belong to that culture. That's the parent's choice, but if the parent doesn't pass the culture on then there is no other backup, and the end result will inevitably be kids who don't get the meaning in some of what goes on around them (Penny's post again).

My personal opinion, we don't have an obligation to reserach every group's culture in order to understand it. What we _do_ have an obligation to do is to learn a bit of what they believe when we happen to bump into them. And most of all, we _absolutely_ have an obligation not to arbitrarily dismiss a culture as irrelevant or ridiculous until we have some understanding of it.

Graham.