教 is the modern Chinese verb "to teach" and for those who know little about Chinese, this character has several parts to it. The left side and the right side have two different meanings and when they are put together, they mean "teach". If we go back to the classical Chinese characters, which are no longer used, we can see how this character has developed into a stylised form of the original, as well as understand the traditional method of Chinese teaching.
To the right, you can see the Classical Chinese version of this character. It is much easier to see the character's two distinctive parts here than in the modern version. On the left-hand side are two crosses with what looks like a small person underneath them. If you can imagine it, this symbolises a small child who is calculating his times tables, while adjacent to him is an older person holding a stick. This person is looking over him, ready to correct his every error with a sharp thwack of his stick against the child. This actually very neatly coincides with what we know about traditional Chinese education, which is very conservative and strict on its students. In the modern day version of this character, the parts have changed somewhat, but they are still recognisable; the bottom left of the character is written "子", the modern-day character for "child", while on the right we can see the equivalent of "父", which means "father".
If we couple this with the English word "teach", we can see fundamentally different cultural norms in the two groups of people. As we all know, English has also transformed a lot throughout history, coming from Old English, and before that Proto-Germanic, so we can therefore say that the word "teach" must have changed in a similar way as the Chinese character has changed. This is true as the form of the word has transformed while passing through the ages of time. Going back through history, we find that in Old English the word was represented as "tǣċan", while in Proto-Germanic it was "*taikijanan", from the original Proto-Indo-European word "*deyǵe-". Ultimately, the word has changed form in these four stages of history, but its meaning has stayed the same, just like in Chinese. The word "teach" means, and always has meant, "to show; to point out; to declare; to tell" which gives us a slightly more laid-back image to the man looking over his child with a stick that we see in Chinese. This goes along with our current thoughts about teaching, that is more about showing and telling, rather than discipline.
To conclude, you can think of this as just one way that words shape our culture and just by looking into the roots and history of words, you can find out so much about the culture of a people.
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