Colonization & Culture

Whether a community welcomes colonization has very much to do with the original culture of the people within the community. The British once colonized Hong Kong and Canada. On the spectrum of welcoming colonization, Hong Kong was more on the positive side than Canada. This might be culturally related. Most Chinese prefer their children to receive education, and the ancient Chinese schooling system was very rigid, with parental corporal punishment on children as a norm, and rigorous Chinese traditional examination systems already implemented. Therefore, when the British came to Hong Kong to establish a Western education system, the Chinese were willing to send their children to study in the schools founded by the British. The parents learned the Western way of raising children, gradually reducing parental dictatorship and corporal punishment of children. On the other hand, the indigenous children in North America were mostly born and raised in rural areas, and their parents were free-going hunters, with the concept that only caught animals were kept in a fenced area for a long time. Consequently, it would be very unacceptable to the indigenous culture to discipline children in a confined area with a rigid schedule of schooling. Colonization is a neutral word, like the word adoption, but when people and culture interact, then chemistry becomes complicated. Some parents/guardians work out well with their adopted children, and their children appreciate the nourishment they received from their adopters and the physical bearing of their birth parents; however, there are situations in the governance of the adopters might not be culturally compatible with the original culture of the adopted children, or the families encountered bad adopters. May God’s grace and mercy be among us all!