Yesterday at school our entire philosophy class warmly welcomed and chatted with a class for non native english speakers.
Although, the communication with some of the kids was hard at times, talking with this group of kids was eye opening as many of them were born in countries far from the United States. Many of them had different cultural values and interests than the typical American born student. At one point the conversation got around to soccer. It seemed like one kid we talked to from from Guatemala couldn't tell us enough about how much he loved soccer. Almost everything he talked about had to do with watching or playing soccer. Because this kid's interests revolved solely around soccer, which was different than my American interests, it made sense that this kid represented a cultural distinction from US culture. If philosophy comes from culture and your society then wouldn't it make sense that this student from Guatemala would have at least a slightly different philosophy or set of beliefs than my American born one?
In addition to our differences in culturally based beliefs, the expectation in our group's discussion was that American born english speakers would ask the questions to the non native english speakers. It almost seemed as though the non native english speakers felt left out or alienated from the discussion at times. A reason for this could be one of Hegel's theories for alienation: the estrangement from your fellow man. In this case the fellow man could be considered every other student at the high school that spoke english fluently. Because the non native english speakers don't speak english completely fluently, they are in constant competition with fluent english speakers to improve their english. This causes the group of non fluent english speakers to become alienated from the group of fluent ones. This could explain why and how groups of non native english speakers form.
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