•  Lareau, Annette Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. New York: The Falmer Press. 1989 (Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, [9])

Education ... begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. (My Pedagogic Creeed, Dewey 1897. my strikethrough)

Note how this statement assumes an assymetry between the individual who is being educated and the other individuals who are doing the educating: in brief the first is ignorant of what the second has learned. Given that the transfer does not appear automatic (or unconscious), and yet is essential for the future of humanity, then ignorance is a problem.

What is it with ignorance that philosophers, politicians, parents are so concerned with it?

For at least two centuries political actors (e.g. Horace Mann or John Dewey in the US, or Jules Ferry in France) in the emerging European and American democracies have argued forcefully that it is the responsibility of the State to transform children into proper citizens by controlling their education.

This was something that was based on philosophical and moral argumentation, not on "empirical science" or "big data." It can easily be traced, in the European tradition, to Plato and Aristotle (and probably Confucius in China).

Once the principle was fully enshrined in State practices (by the late 19th century in Europe, later in the rest of the world), the question may then arise as to whether the actual State institutions, that is Schools, actually perform what it had been hoped, and asserted, that they would perform.

When doubts began to emerge, say in the mid 20th century, and when various behavioral sciences convinced about everyone that they could measure the efficacy of an institution, the moral/philosophical imperative was operationalized as an issue that concerned "learning" a certain curriculum, that is putting factoids into brains.

Then the question shifted from:

"Does Johnny (or Sheila...) know this or that [e.g. how to read]?"

Once the question is asked, then when it is found (through any kind of assessment) that some children do not know this or that, one starts asking

"Why can't Johnny read?"

and thus (in early 21st century political language)

Ethnographies of systemic privilege

These questions about concerns and concerned people, , and their consequences of asking these questions, are the core of my work, and what I emphasize in this course. And any answers to these question require that we move back and notice the centrality of what I would term the "knowledge-requirement postulate" and its correlatives in theoretical and applied sociology and anthropology.

Concretely, these postulates about the dangers of ignorance, and the need to remedy it, operate at very different levels of generalization. One is fundamental. The other a pressing political problems.

1. Theoretically, in relation to human life in general
   1. a theoretical question
   2. with philosophical (liberal education and personal growth)
   3. and economic implications (human capital)
2. Practically, in relation to schooling in Europe and the United States:
   1. a question of constitutional politics (the shaping of democratic citizens)
   2. a question of local politics (the organization of schooling, taxation, state control, etc.)
   3. a question of national policy (reforming institutions, e.g. NCLB, "Race to the top," teacher evaluation)

Starting with the theory of the relation between social order and knowledge

1. Knowledge is fundamentally necessary for socialibity:

   Social life (order) requires people to be shaped, individually and one at a time -- human beings must get to know the grounds on which their society is built, they must learn and there must be means by which they learn this (whatever it is);

   1. sociological versions:
      1. Max Weber on culture as a value concept (1949: 77)
      2. Talcott Parsons & Edward Shils on transmissibility and the power of symbols (1951)
   2. anthropological versions
      1. the Boasians
         1. classically, from Margaret Mead (1937)
         2. as summarized by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952)
         3. as enshrined by Goodenough (1971)
      2. the Parsonians and their students
         1. Geertz (1966)
         2. Schneider (1968)
         3. Boon (1972)

      Note the ambivalence of many of these writers. Note also that they do not represent various other traditions, including those based on certain readings of Gramsci, or Lévi-Strauss, not to mention the more literary understandings

2. But this knowledge is profoundly inscribed and hidden
   1. anthropological versions
      1. "It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water" (Kluckhohn 1949: 11): how does this apply to the discovery of air (atmospheric pressure, etc.) by human beings? (not to mention principles of social organization and political organization that have been discussed for as long as we have records)
   2. sociological versions:
      1. Pierre Bourdieu and working class misunderstanding (1977 [1970])
   3. philosophical versions:
      1. Michel Foucault on the panopticon (1978 [1975])

   Note that the exact theoretical progression from society as requiring individual knowledge to the final shaping varies significantly across these authors and the periods when they worked. They differ particularly in which step in the progression they emphasize. Lewis, influenced as he was by Erik Erickson, emphasized emotional learning. Ogbu emphasized values. Bourdieu emphasized the practical work of people in authority. But all end giving us a sense that the individual shaping produced by being born into a particular time and place ("a culture") is, as Bourdieu put it, "irreversible." (on the habitus)

Practically and politically, in the United States

1. Given the dangers of ignorance and the need for the state to remediate this ignorance, then it is the duty of social scientists to explain the source of the ignorance. The formula: "although xxxx is positively linked to school success, there is not enough of xxxxx in some population thus leading their children to fail in school." How this formula
   1. anthropological versions
      1. Oscar Lewis and the culture of poverty (1965)
      2. John Ogbu and varieties of ways into America (1974)
      3. Shirley Brice Heath and patterns of southern cultures
   2. sociological versions, among many:
      1. Paulo Freire and the need for conscientization
      2. Paul Willis and "why" working class kids get working class jobs (1977)
      3. Anette Lareau and home advantage (1989)
2. Lareau and the "qualitative sociology" of family/school relationship

   Home advantage is quite a successful book with journalists and policy makers. (New York Times March 9, 2006)

   1. In brief:

      Colton	:	Prescot
      	::
      separation	:	interconnectedness
      working class	:	middle class
      ignorance	:	knowledge

      1. psycho-socio differences in
         1. values
         2. knowledge about what teachers want
      2. that is, social "capital" (a very influential concept proposed by Bourdieu)
   2. note the multiplicity of content in assumed knowledge:
      1. parents vs. parents
         1. teachers vs. parents (with difference knowledge depending on the position of each in relation to the other)

      The activity of parents in relation to their schooling has become again a visible issue with politicians (Arnie Duncan November 2013, critics (Ravitch 11/17/13), and philosophers and political activists.

      1. this one is particularly challenging since there appears to be disagreement between parents and teachers in both sets of relationships (upper/teachers, lower/teachers) with the teachers having to deal differently with the different interpretations of their authority even though Lareau implies that teachers in both schools have similar interpretations.
   3. on Lareau's methodology
      1. from multiple anecdotes (reports of observations) and statements from interviews
         1. not randomly collected
         2. driven by a priori research questions: research "bias"
      2. to the analytic production of two "they" (the people of Prescott as against the people of Colton) with a causative difference: an "interconnectedness beween family life and school life" that is either present or absent.