Imagine being completely dependent on the food that you grow to sustain yourself and your family. What skills would be most important to turn over a fruitful harvest year after year?
Truthfully, it depends on what you’re growing. On a rice paddy, the water sustaining your crops is not limited to your plot of land. If your neighbor drains too much water, they create a dangerous situation for everyone around them. Imagine, however, that you are a wheat farmer; your harvest is less reliant upon irrigation and rather mediated by nature, whether it rains or not.
The rice theory asserts that social collectivism arises from agriculturally conditioned behaviors like those associated with rice farming. This theory raised the question of where cultural traits come from. In a 2020 cross-sectional study by professors Thomas Talhelm and Alexander S. English, 11,000 survey responses showed that in areas where lowland rice cultivation is the dominant agricultural industry, social norms are much tighter. This points to a new way of thinking about culture: as a result of environmental conditions.
In the context of Oak Park and River Forest High School, cultural characteristics shape students’ daily lives. The way students read their peers’ cultural backgrounds drives their stereotypes, their assumptions and their interactions. Most of us don’t know that the cultural differences we see in others have concrete explanations. Without that knowledge, we don’t respond to those differences with curiosity. We respond with judgment.
When a student seems reserved, or loud, or group-focused, or independent, it is easy to read those traits as flaws. We rarely ask where the behavior came from. The rice theory gives one clear answer: deeply held cultural tendencies can trace back to the conditions under which people’s ancestors lived. Conditions as specific as whether food depended on shared water or individual rainfall. These are not choices. They are inherited patterns, shaped by generations of necessity.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of law and philosophy at New York University, argues that one of the most common social errors we make is treating things a person was born into as if they were deliberate choices and then holding them responsible for those choices. At OPRF, this plays out every day. A student raised in a culture that values group loyalty over individual expression is not being cliquey. A student from a background that prizes direct speech is not being aggressive. They are acting from value systems with real historical roots. When we don’t know this, we fill the gap with an assumption. Assumption becomes stereotype.
Philosopher Charles Taylor called this misrecognition: what happens when a person is seen not as they are, but through a false image others project onto them. Taylor argued this causes real harm over time, not just awkwardness. In a school as culturally varied as ours, misrecognition is a structural risk. It is built into every interaction where students meet cultural difference without the tools to understand it.
The result is that OPRF never becomes the shared community it could be. We get groups that coexist without meeting–not because students are hostile, but because small misreadings stack up and quietly teach everyone to stick to familiar ground. Hannah Arendt wrote that a real community requires people to actually encounter one another, not just share a building. What blocks that encounter here is not hostility. It is a lack of knowledge.
The fix is not for everyone to abandon their cultural identity in the name of unity. It is something harder and more useful: cultural literacy. If students understood that the differences they see in their peers are not random, that they come from historical and environmental forces just as real as the ones that shaped their own background, there would be less room for judgment. It is hard to dismiss a difference once you understand where it came from.
The rice paddy and the wheat field seem remote. But they are closer to the hallways of this school than most of us think. Every different way of connecting, speaking, and belonging on display here has a history behind it. The question is whether we are willing to look for it.
