Sociology Week 4

Week Four Thursday 9/20/2018

By: Maddie Gums

            During class on Thursday we discussed what norms are and how they differ from society to society. For example, a norm for us in America to sit on our phones while we eat dinner, but in a culture like Europe doing that would be considered highly inappropriate and disrespectful. Another topic we discussed is high culture compared to popular culture, high culture is what distinguishes the society’s elite from other aspects of the society. While popular culture are latter cultural patterns that are wide spread among most of a society’s population and not just one specific group of people. A topic we talked about in class that I found very interesting is multiculturalism. I find multiculturalism interesting because it is an educational program that recognizes multiple different parts of cultural diversity in the United States and promotes equality among everybody. I think this is very important and should be implemented more into our modern school system so the children growing up in the society we live in can appreciate out “melting pot” and the rich culture that everyone brings to it. Learning about the people that we interact with on a daily basis can make our interactions with the various people we meet more pleasant and enriching to our lives if we know a little bit about various cultures around us.

Definitions:

Norm: Rules and expectations by which a society guides the behavior of its members.

High Culture: The former cultural patterns that distinguishes a society’s elite.

Multiculturalism: An educational program recognizing past and present cultural differences past and present cultural diversity in US society and promoting the equality of all cultural traditions.

One thing I can do to benefit myself and society is by promoting multiculturalism among my children, and the people I interact with on a daily basis. This will benefit me because I will learn from the people around me, and this will benefit society because it will be me teaching people about why learning about other cultures is awesome.

One thing I can do to negatively impact myself and society is by ignoring the norms of my culture, and the norms of the cultures I visit. If I went to Europe and did not plan to stay for dinner for three hours that would be seen as rude. This would negatively impact me because I would have people looking down on me and the society I am from because everyone would know I am American.

One thing society can do to impact me in a positive way Is by offering more free events promoting the learning of our culture and its origin this would be positive because it would bring me closer with the community around me and it is good for society to have people learning more about it.

One thing society can do to impact me in a negative way is by ignoring the fact that it is good to learn about multiculturalism. This would be bad for me because it would not give me the opportunity to learn about the people around me. This would be bad for society because this would cause some people to be very wary about other people because they would not know about them.

A Solution to society not promoting multiculturalism is by the people within the society who believe in teaching about multiculturalism coming together and organizing free events for everyone to teach with various activities and speaches about why this is important.