Required:

Recommended:

1. The quasi-universality of schooling
   1. issues of empire, colonialism, and the authority of the specialists
      1. the training of shamans, priests, and religious specialists: what should they know? where will they learn it?
      2. China, the administration of empire and the examination system
      3. making scholars in the Greek, Roman, and European world through the end of the 19th century
      4. democratic citizenship and its formation
      5. production of human capital
   2. in general issues of meta-culture (meta-linguistics, meta-pragmatics): culture about culture and what to do next to shape the future for oneself and consociates
      1. philosophers (Rousseau, Dewey,...) and politicians/policy makers (Jefferson, Napoleon, Mann, ...)
      2. organized sub-polities (the development of parochial schools, yeshivas, etc.)
      3. parents (home schooling, revolutionary, reactionary, priviledged; charter schools, private schools)
2. "Local" and ongoing developments (--> "culturing" of schooling through ongoing controversy about the present and the future)
   1. discourses about "what is good" and "what is bad" about "our schools"
      1. imagining schools and figuring out how to organize them.
      2. the reforming of schools through further critique and advocacy in response to earlier discourses, exercise of power.
   2. governmental policies about school organization and control
      1. the constitution of schools through political activity and the exercise of power.
      2. the reforming of schools through political activity in response to earlier exercises of power.
   3. "customs" that may not be controlled panoptically but can be brought to meta-discursive awareness (discourses about everyday discourses)--i.e. "common sense" about the way children are, or what children can do
      1. the issue of discursive awareness in relation to everyday practices (vs. Bourdieu on habitus)
   4. the continuation of seminaries, yeshivas, sanskrit schools, muslim schools, etc.
   5. fee based schools around the world, charter schools in the US
3. Tobin and new approaches to comparativism
   • Hiroki's antics (12:30)
   • Hiroki bullies and Midori intervenes (19:02)
   1. from comparing the separate (e.g. Heath)
   2. to the production of difference through local meta-discursive practices about the "other" (it is not the anthropologist who notices the "otherness" but others)
4. The evidence:
   1. greetings
   2. children and children (who can carry whom?)
   3. disciplining a misbehaving child
      1. the practice
      2. the local discourse about the practice
      3. the "other" discourses about the practice
      4. the discourse about the "other" discourses about the practice

   Who is most respectful of the child? Those who control Komatsudani or those who control St. Timothy?

5. interesting questions
   1. individualism and control in Japan and America
   2. child welfare and what children can be let do
   3. child development and what is appropriate for children of various ages
      1. ignorance of Developmental Psychology (as research discipline) or limitations of the ways of knowing of Developmental Psychology that produces new ignorance about the development of the psyche? Not an idle question given the hegemony of developmental psychology in school policy.
   4. "othering" and justifying
      1. note that the various classrooms Tobin documents have much in common (e.g. success/failure, expert knowledge/specified ignorance, etc.)
      2. note that teachers, administrators, etc., all "recognize" the classrooms as classrooms that were both the same and different. That is: all became aware of difference and were willing to discuss it
         1. Note the consciousness of self/other
         2. Note the judgements (moral, practical, philosophical)
6. Methodological note
   1. not controlled comparison to evaluate the value of various variables, but comparison to highlight possibilities within broader structures (and then the patterning of local structure -- thus "culture")
      1. lingering positivism about "typicality"
      2. not only "observation" and then "interpretation/representation" (the usual ethnographic progression) but interpretations/representations of "observations of interpretation/representations" (people talking about their practices in the light of what they are being shown of other people's practices);
         1. a quasi-experimental design (not in the technical sense) to trigger participants' discourse about their own common sense practices.
            1. this raises fundamental questions about meta-linguistic awareness of cultural practices: are these dependent on forms of habitus (internalized dispositions developed from experiences within organized, structured, fields) or on the availability of certain meta-pragmatic settings where one can practice about practices (i.e. discuss, develop, and rationalize "policies")