This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper, Tanzania on August 26th, 2025.
Shimbo Pastory
The sociological concept ‘culturelessness’ denoting a lack of deep and consistent roots in a cultural setting, is a few centuries old, with its appearance in literature being noted since mid-19th century.
A straightforward explanation of culturelessness is the absence or lack of culture.
But as it is nearly impossible to find a society that is absolutely without a culture, we can inform the conceptualization of culturelessness within the reach and margins of obtainable practicality, as persistent perceived absence, erosion, or denial of cultural identity, practices, values or systems of meaning within an individual or a group.
Culturelessness is a fairly new problem, but one that is widely spreading globally owing to the growth of what sociologists have progressively conceptualized as the ‘global culture’ using the concept of Roland Robertson. Two important sociologists in premiers of this idealization were Marshall McLuhan and Immanuel Wallerstein.
The former envisioned in the early sixties how the world was becoming a ‘global village,’ a concept attributed to his person, while the latter in the 1970s set foundations for systemic studies of globalization and interconnected cultural and economic dynamics.
Wallerstein’s important theory was the ‘World-Systems Theory’ expounded in his book titled “The Modern World-System,” Vol. 1, 1974. This is all to tell us that the formation of ‘global culture’ is not an idea, but a reality with consequences to individual cultures.
One of Marshall McLuhan’s most famous theories is that ‘the medium is the message.’ This can help knit and wrap our ideas here as we brainstorm how education can help remedy culturelessness. Education in content and function is both a medium and a message.
As a medium, education ought to carry cultural identity. If education has to restore or impact cultural rootedness, then it has to resonate the same rootedness in its content and modality. This entails that the values of our culture need to be deepened in the entire education process.
Going back to the roots of the very concept of education, we have a wide range of thoughts. In Greek, education is ‘paideia’, which means ‘cultural formation,’ an all-encompassing meaning going beyond particular formal subjects.
In Latin, where the direct English root is, there are two words. The first, ‘Educare’ means ‘to bring up, to rear, to train, or to nourish’, the second, ‘Educere,’ means ‘to lead out, to draw forth, to bring out.’ These two meanings complement each other and explain better what education should do having in mind its all-encompassing role in integral formation of a person.
Making education subservient to the formative needs of the entirety of the human person as a culturally rooted being who lives in society is restoring its true meaning. Consideration of internal migration in the country is also crucial in education delivery and content as it anticipates how other cultures are intermixing, others left behind, and others affecting each other.
Culturelessness is irreparable, as tradition dies. Tradition, coming from Latin ‘traditio’ means ‘to hand-over’ or ‘to pass on’. There will be nothing to hand over in a few generations to come if our young people have no cultural roots that they identify with and have an envious and proud sentiment for.
Young people who have never experienced cultural practices, never abstained from taboos, never dreaded the cultural norms, and never learnt their history or native languages cannot pass the same to those who come after them.
As Africans, we cannot say our cultures are not important to us, hence the need to pattern our education in a positive and protective stance towards these cultures to prevent formation of people who are culturally shallow or entirely cultureless.
Our education system should not only produce experts, but people with deep knowledge and love of their roots. There is currently a wave affecting mostly young people who tend to hold western languages, practices and ideas as of a higher importance than theirs. This is acculturation facilitated by media and internet.
What we need mostly now is creating avenues in education for enculturation, to help deepen our children and young people in their cultural knowledge and sense of value for continuity. Cultural knowledge cannot be sufficiently substituted for, and can as well not be done away with without serious impact.
The cultural things we dearly treasure are stripped of that value if such a culture is in part or its entirety not known. What is not known cannot be given due appreciation. It is time our education becomes a means and bulwark for our African cultures, alongside other priorities of producing experts, ending poverty and qualifying our people to compete for jobs with their peers in the global village.
Shimbo Pastory is an advocate for positive social transformation and a student of the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, the Philippines. Website: www.shimbopastory.com