Review - Empire of Schools by RL Cutts

I have to do some reading these days and I thought I could talk about books that I find conspicuous, in a sense.
Years ago I read "The Yamato Dynasty" by Mr. and Mrs. Seagrave and asked a professor of Japanese History what she thought about it. She replied that Mr. Seagrave could not be trusted because he was a TIME LIFE journalist and thus lacked real academic research methodology. I didn't quite understand at the time, but now that I read Cutss I kind of understand what she was aiming at.

Linguistic research suggests that the farther away a culture or an ethnic group lives from our point of view, the more alien they look in our eyes, the more easily we tend to believe even the most outrageous statements about it. Like
"Japanese have no individuality",
"Iranians are fundamentalist Islamists", or
"Eskimos have 300 words for snow."
I am not claiming that Mr. Cutts writes only nonsense and that his book was bad altogether. In many cases he is spot-on. What I am trying to say is that there is clear evidence that Mr. Cutts wishes to increase the sales numbers of his book by implying there were more Japanese idiosyncrasies than there really are. I don't think he meant harm, neither, but it looks like he failed to compare what he experienced to other cultural environments that he knows. He would have realized that some of his points are not as outstanding as he thought they were.

Category:

Education

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