Week 9 Task 4

Is there a potential problem being stored up for people is 'education' is tailored to fit their cultural and personal preferences?

Tailoring education to fit into an individual’s cultural and personal preferences can have quite detrimental effects. I do believe that with teaching methods there should be some “input from students” (Prensky) but the main influence upon style of teaching should be teacher driven. There are a lot of disruptive children within school so receiving their input on what forms of education would greaten their attention can only be a good thing. Also there are those children that struggle with certain subjects and so "tailoring instruction to meet individual needs of children experiencing trouble learning to read" (Baker et al , 2000:50-51)obviously is important, they should be given their preferences for styles that they feel they learn from best. But if children were able to choose subjects that they preferred then they could remove foreign languages, restricting their knowledge of other cultures language, attitudes and behaviors. At the end of the day educational styles are never going to be well received by all individuals because we are all different, this is why education can’t be too flexible as to take on everyone’s personal preferences just wouldn’t be possible.


Individuals immigrating to England may find that they want to keep their cultural beliefs as they move abroad. If I was to move to Spain I would want to keep my cultural identity but at the same time I would need to embrace other cultures too. It would be out of place to live in Spain, and not even attempt to learn their language. Cultural preference then means that individuals are potentially restricting themselves, learning only what suits them.

Cultural inertia involves those who are reluctant to adopt a different culture even though the external environment is changing. Cultural inertia in terms of work force, could involve individuals who have been working for a company for 20 years and are are used to their fixed ways. They are unhappy with the changes and as a result they do not want to comply with the changes that the company is making. So if there’s new technology that they need to gain knowledge of these individuals find it difficult to adapt to these changes, because they are not their personal preference.