Do all cultures share the same values?

STILL MORE: From Roger Scruton's 2010 essay on multiculturalism:

FOR WHAT IS BEING brought home to us, through painful experiences that we might have avoided had it been permitted before now to say the truth, is that we, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be. We don't require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life, or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared moral and legal inheritance, a shared language, and a shared public sphere. Our societies are built upon the Judeo-Christian ideal of neighbor-love, according to which strangers and intimates deserve equal concern. They require each of us to respect the freedom and sovereignty of every other, and to acknowledge the threshold of privacy beyond which it is a trespass to go unless invited. Our societies depend upon a culture of law-abidingness and open contracts, and they reinforce these things through the educational traditions that have shaped our common curriculum. It is not an arbitrary cultural imperialism that leads us to value Greek philosophy and literature, the Hebrew Bible, Roman law, and the medieval epics and romances, and to teach these things in our schools. They are ours, in just the way that the legal order and the political institutions are ours: they form part of what made us, and convey the message that it is right to be what we are.

Over time immigrants can come to share these things with us: the experience of America bears ample witness to this. And they the more easily do so when they recognize that, in any meaningful sense of the word, our culture is also a multiculture, incorporating elements absorbed in ancient times from all around the Mediterranean basin and in modern times from the adventures of European traders and explorers across the world. But this kaleidoscopic culture is still one thing, with a set of inviolable principles at its core; and it is the source of social cohesion across Europe and America. Our culture allows for a great range of ways of life; it enables people to privatize their religion and their family customs, while still belonging to the public realm of open dealings and shared allegiance. For it defines that public realm in legal and territorial terms, and not in terms of creed or kinship.

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate into places settled by Western culture? The multiculturalists say that we must make room for them, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish. Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them intoour culture, and not beside and against it. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs, and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. Is this an injustice? Surely not. If immigrants come it is because they gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost....

RELATED:

The Classic Learning Test (CLT) has emerged as a rival to long-established college entrance exams such as the ACT and SAT. The CLT draws its test texts from classic works of literature. Recent efforts to balance ethnicity and sex in the CLT's author bank have drawn criticism, which prompted a response from Jeremy Tate. Ben Merkle, president of New Saint Andrew's College, a Christian Great Books school, who serves on the CLT's author bank committee, is more concerned by the effort to de-Christianize classical education:

For one thing, I really dislike the stripping of "Christian" from Classical Christian Education. Once you delete Christian, you really have a hard time explaining why we are focused on the western intellectual tradition. Once you strip Christian out of there you will either end up cultural Marxism on the one hand - you can't say that one culture is better than another, so there is no reason to prefer one tradition over another. Or, on the other hand, you will end up with an academic version of white boy summer - we pick white authors because we just like white people. Both of these paths are the death of classical education.

Hillsdale College would, I suspect, have no trouble defending a non-sectarian rationale for the focus of its K-12 charter school curriculum on the Western intellectual tradition: This is the tradition upon which American civilization was built, the tradition and pedagogy that educated the Founders and Framers of the American republic. In the February 1995 issue of Imprimis, then VP of Admissions Robert Blackstock wrote in defense of a focus on the Western tradition:

The last two hundred years of freedom and prosperity in America, and our success in pulling together as one united people, have been the direct result of the Western tradition and the ideas, habits, customs, prescriptions, and views it embraces. In addition, that tradition has provided us with a common vision and shared ideals; a cultural heritage and heroes that speak to all men in all conditions; a strong sense of community and responsibility; and a national consensus on important matters of governance. I am not claiming, of course, that the Western tradition is the only tradition or the only worthy one; indeed, there are many, and one of the West's strengths has been its willingness to borrow and adapt the good ideas of others. But the ideas of the West are without equal in the world, and we ignore them at our peril....

At the national level, something else has become abundantly clear over the past few years: Although one set of ideas has led America to greatness over most of its history, quite a different set of ideas lead us as a people today. I refer to these older ideas as the "ideas of freedom." They are the core of the Western tradition and were once part and parcel of every American's vocabulary as well as their emotional, philosophical, and intellectual makeup.

They are not perfect ideas, but they are undeniably good; in many ways, they are the best set of ideas the world has ever known. For the great sweep of human history and, in fact, until very recently, most men lived in or near poverty and under the thumb of oppressive government. But they were finally liberated by a set of ideas that found their first full expression in the experiment in self-government that began in America in the late 18th century and soon spread throughout the West. No other set of ideas and no other tradition has done so much for the human condition before or since.

From the educational philosophy page of Hillsdale's Barney Charter Schools Initiative:

When we turn to the primary sources of the Western canon, we find men and women aptly described as rational and moral beings. From man's rationality and morality, we extrapolate a third faculty: man is social or political. Excellence in these three faculties--knowledge of the world, moral self-government, and civic virtue--provides the three legs of the stool upon which civilization and civilized man rests. The purpose of classical education is to lead students to excellence in these faculties, and a classical school serves as a bulwark to our civilized and free society. It is therefore the mission of the Barney Charter School Initiative to promote the founding of classical charter schools and excellence in their teaching and operations to the end that public-school students may be educated in the liberal arts and sciences and receive instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.

The aim of classical education is high, but not unreasonable. Its primary function is the dissemination of knowledge; self-government and civic virtue are essential complements to this function, but only occasionally as explicit parts of the curriculum. The dissemination of knowledge should be purposeful, and it should begin at an early age. Students do not merely need to learn "critical thinking skills," but also need to furnish their minds and imaginations with something to think about. The emphasis of our curriculum is upon the core disciplines of math, science, history, and language arts, followed by attention to music, art, and foreign languages. Each of these disciplines is taught with an emphasis upon our own history and traditions as American citizens and inheritors of Western Civilization.

Hillsdale's approach to teaching American history is the 1776 Curriculum:

The inspiration for the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum springs from a sincere admiration and respect for America's Founders and the principles they expressed so beautifully in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal, their natural rights pre-exist government, and governments are formed to protect the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of all citizens.

The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum tells the whole American story -- the promises, the perils, the tragedies, and triumphs....

The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum highlights both the moments when the nation has fallen short of its founding principles and when it has nobly met them. It is an unabashed, candid look at the fullness of American history.

Fifty years later, the Sawi continue to follow Jesus and to spread the gospel to neighboring peoples.

After this "peace child" explanation of the Gospel, says Steve, "There was a breakthrough among the Sawi. They started recognizing that Jesus was God's peace child-the ultimate peace child."

"They began responding to the Gospel, and the Sawi eventually began reaching out in their own missionary efforts to tribes they had previously warred against," Steve adds.

Flash forward to today. This year is the fiftieth year since the Sawi first received and understood the life-changing news of Christ. But has that Good News stuck?

Steve says it's more than stuck: it's expanded. When his parents first went to West Papua, there were few people groups in the islands with the Gospel message. He says now, there are few who do not. The Sawi meanwhile have continued to spread the Truth of Christ to others.

For this jubilee year celebration, Steve, his brothers (who are both on the mission field), and Don are headed back to Indonesia. They are told 2,000 or 3,000 Sawi will greet them as they celebrate the coming of Christ to their community and baptize at least 50 new believers.