Last weekend, my friend took me to the Mercado Municipal and the nearby shopping streets downtown. In the discount stores, people push by you in a very assertivee way! It didn't bother me, but my Brazilian friend was quite embarrassed, and she kept apologizing, shaking her head and saying "it's not educated behavior! They are not educated!"
A few days later, I was talking with some Brazilian friends about my experiences in Argentina and I mentioned the remarkable public politeness I had observed there: people giving up their seats on the subway to the elderly, helping people who seem ill or distressed, retrieving dropped items for strangers on the street, and so on. One of my coworkers attributed this strong social code to the educational system. Argentina has one of the broadest educational systems in Latin America, with very high literacy rates. My friend's argument was that one result of having broad-based education is that people acquire a sense of civic duty and literally learn how to behave. I found this fascinating - it's the kind of thing we don't tend to think about in the developed world - and the more I think about it, the more on-target it seems.
No comments:
Post a Comment