Critical Thinking By Gary Colombo: A Summary

Have you ever been labeled as a stereotype or labeled anyone as a certain stereotype? Where do these stereotypes come from? The real answer lies in cultural myths and how they are formed from within ourselves and from within many groups creating many cultural myths that are seen everywhere. Gary Colombo the author of “Cultural myth” and “Critical thinking”, gives us a definition of cultural myth as, “[Holding] people together by providing us with a shared set of customs, values, ideas, and beliefs, as well as a common language.” Colombo is a professor emeritus of English and ESL at Los Angeles City College. Colombo provides a way of seeing cultural myths through explanations of some of the cultural myths in great detail. Colombo talks about

They help us to connect to others or help us find a better us. An identity helps other connect to you by creating a bond. This bond can be anything that is in common and in some cases not in common. The bonds help you as person to feel like you belong to a group or can be a way to help you on the journey of life. As stated by Colombo, “Our identities – who we are and how we relate to others – are deeply entangled with the cultural values we have internalized since infancy” (pg. 7). Ever since we are born we are “entangled” to theses identities. When you are born your identity is a piece of paper that states who you are as a person. For example, if you are born into a family of a Mexican ethnicity then you are considered Mexican but if you born in the United States of America. Then you are an American with Mexican being your race. That is only part of your identity because your identity can grow and expand to include anything about you. Rose states, “You’ll see a handful of student far excel you in courses that sound exotic and that are only in the curriculum of the elite: French, physics, trigonometry. And all this is happening while you’re trying to shape an identity, your body is changing, and your emotions are running wild. If you’re a working-class kid in the vocational track, the options you’ll have to deal with this will be constrained in certain ways: you’re defined by your school as “slow”; you’re placed into a curriculum that isn’t designed to liberate you but to occupy you” (pg. 128). Your identity has a lot to do with every aspect of your life. In school, he was seen as “slow” because his test scores were accidentally switched with another person with the same last name. While in school we felt as he was slow because that is the way they treated him. The curriculum did not liberate him but occupied him, meaning