By: josé luis calvo buezas  (Page 2/7)

The creation of classrooms of cultural immersion is a necessary factor to favor an affective encounter, equality in relationships, and respect for human rights and the Constitution.

• Knowledge of the language is an absolute priority to obtain a suitable coexistence, social integration, learning, and mestization between nations and cultures.
• The designation of tutors specifically for immigrants is very advisable because their necessities are more than those of a normal student and the contact with the family even harder.
• The participation of foreigners in the school board, parent and student associations, and among the delegates of courses and groups must be promoted. 

Once this general frame has been reviewed, we approach the concrete subject of the knowledge of the new society’s language and functions it fulfills.

Personality, language, and culture

Generally, every person’s identity, as well as that of diverse groups in particular, is greatly determined by their own culture. Humans, as opposed to the rest of the animals, are born practically complete: a person is nature and culture, so that the individual is partly biology, history, and project. Ecologically, according to J.L. Pinillos, the human is an ecumenical being. Humans can build a home by any means, which in turn means that in reality they lack a natural oikía (house). Nature gave birth to human beings, forcing humans to invent our own world, and to perish. Its long stage of family dependences is completed slowly, with a long process of acculturation. Nature and biology make us equal, whereas culture, i.e., everyone’s circumstances and social surrounding elements of civilization, differentiates and accentuates our own identity. This increases the diversity that unites the flexibility of personality and society.

Homogeneity and diversity, therefore, go hand in hand and develop jointly, in a complementary synthesis, as two separate halves. We are all equal, we are all different, and everybody is an individual with a radical individuality. Here we find the inconsistency of racism in the personality of those who profess it as a learned code of information and valuation. Socio-cultural learning, and not nature, is what provides us with stereotypes and clichés, with schemes of understanding the social norms to regulate the reciprocal relations, with the classification criteria of hierarchy, with schemes of values, and with the operative guidelines. Racists are not born, but made. The socialization process is at the same time a personalization process, that is to say, a transformation in which the human individual acquires its own personality with all the elements that integrate it. Numerous psychologists and sociologists agree with this exposition. J. Piaget indicated that, thanks to the social life, an individual can learn the reflective capabilities of its own mind.

Durkheim considered personality to be a response to the received pressures of social means. The cultural influence of society develops the individual’s mentality. This central idea should be kept in mind when approaching the learning of those who are undergoing the process of immigration whose cultural environment is changed, or those who live in a duality that is partially different from their social life as a student. The migratory processes always include cultural changes because societies construct a peculiar symbolic system, according to which it understands reality, organizes social life, raises the direction of its future life project, and sets the angles of perception and orientation of conduct.