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Regarding Brookfield's term "culture suicide" discussion, I would add my thoughts as a first- generation college student from a family of ten. First, the individual must, at some point, break beyond the cultural limitations of parents and grandparents generations that would say "you do not need education so much as hard work." My parents gave me, above all, strong role models of hard work, honesty and responsibility. I never considered college while I attended high school (I was in the Diversified Occupations Program as a high school senior that allowed me to work half days in a auto body shop in Lamesa, Texas.) After a year out of high school working and hearing an older sister tell me I should try college, I finally enrolled part-time at a two-year college. An English professor there inspired me to work on toward a degree. I eventually earned three degrees, but I remember one "cultural dissonance" incident that happened while I was working on my master's degree at Texas Tech. I was working at two jobs, going to graduate school, and trying to be a good father and husband when my own father,a West Texas cowboy, came by to visit one day. Thirty years later I can still hear the words my father spoke: "son, I wish you would hurry up and get this schoolin' over with and get a job." In his mind, as long as I was in school, I was not really working. My theory is that each generation takes its' children as far as limitations of vision allow. Remember playing marbles as a children how we used "spans (created by placing the thumb against the ground and stretching the fingers in an ark from the point the thumb touches)" to move the marble toward the hole? I believe each generation creates a "span" that should move the children as far as the family can stretch, given the limitations of education, culture, money, health, etc. We would hope that the new generation does not have to return to the thumb point of the previous generation, but can produce its own span based on opportunities, drive, education, wealth, health, etc. We know living longer is the result of one generation of researchers building on the span of the previous generation. We would hope that education produces the same result. Perhaps rather than "cultural suicide," which would suggests "killing" our participation in our parents' culture, we might become "multi-cultural" suggesting that we can maintain a healthy appreciation for the culture in which we were nurtured, but able to embrace appropriately the elements of our "acquired" cultures. One of my favorite films to make this point is "The Family" starring Edward James Almos, Jimmy Smitts, and others. Sorry for the long posting, but it is early in the morning and I have energy. Don Garnett [log in to unmask]