I’ve always felt a little out of place from my peers with American parents. My father is American but was raised in an Italian neighborhood in Connecticut with family from Italy and Hungary, and my mother was born and raised in the Czech Republic under a communist regime. I’ve always felt a little like a fish out of water and often wondered how I could be walking around halls with so many kids that only have one view of the world. It drove me crazy to think that I had seen life through a lenses of so many types of people and viewpoints, yet here are these kids who were totally deprived of knowing this.

It was like they were living on a stranded island and didn’t even know the rest of the world existed. I thought of my peers almost as the early explorers of the Old World — completely unaware of what else existed. It was the Portuguese who stumbled upon Africa looking for India! The sad truth is none of the people in my life were even looking! I had the fortunate experience of understanding not only that there are different types of people out there but also different ways of life than a standard American lifestyle.

I had been able to live a more globalized life everyday, even in the U.S. By having a foreign parent, I experienced everything in my daily life from two perspectives. I have celebrated different holidays, eaten new diets, seen foreign architecture and am lucky enough to immerse myself in Czech culture, as well as the cultures of many other European countries. I believe, however, that traveling is not enough.

My best experiences are the ones that showed me life abroad, and the everyday experiences are the ones that have actually shaped me into a multicultural person. Visiting foreign grocery stores, staying in a home rather than a hotel, watching the news and visiting small towns are things we can’t always get when falling into tourist traps. Part of it I was only able to experiences from having family in Europe, because I was basically able to to live there, have friends, participate in extracurriculars and even attend a school in the summers I spent there.

But my American schoolmates can't say the same, and that's for a few reasons.

The American school system is to blame. School systems tend to focus curriculum and conversation purely on America. It is practically feared to even consider studying or living abroad. Many schools also do not properly deal with kids with cultural diversity. They tend to put them in a box with cheesy "culture appreciation clubs" that seem to be the opposite of that, instead of teaching kids about other ways of life from day one. I was better at viewing diverse kids as no different than I am or any others at school due to my early exposure to diversity. I see them as simply people with more to talk about, but others may struggle with that and may refrain from mingling.

We also need more cultural appreciation. Unfortunately, Americans have taken nationalism to a whole new level, and both my mom and I have experienced being put down because of our nationalities. Too many Americans are totally unaware of the existence of certain countries, much less of the culture, government or products of other countries. It makes conversations a challenge when you want to go global with your peers and talk about things that aren’t so surface level. Sometimes the judgement can make someone want to hide the most important part about them.

So, how do we fix this? We can start by properly educating students about these cultures from kindergarten and integrating different forms of instruction and research towards different cultures. Also, our media and television needs to be more reflective of true life abroad rather than portraying unrealistic stereotypes. Of course, the number one way to see a different perspective of life is to experience it at least once in your life, so travel like a native!

Sometimes, it seems that European countries are all much more aware of each other than America is of them, and it is something we need to work on. I will continue my passion of showing others how much more the world offers if one simply looked, and I hope you can try to peer beyond your lens to a whole new world.