This is the fourth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Anthropology of Education"

• Gundaker, Grey "Hidden Education among African Americans during Slavery."in Anthropological perspectives on education. Edited by H. Varenne and E. Gordon, 53-74. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press 2008 [2007]

• Rancière, Jacques The ignorant school master. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999 [1987] (Chapters 1, 2, 3)

from the postulate that
participation in social interation requires:

that an individual learns the ways of the people also involved in the interaction

so thoroughly that she has forgotten she has learned these ways

so that the manner of the interaction is fully automatized

and

that this individual mis-understands (is incompetent about), the aspects of the social conditions that are hard on her

or (in other words)

that all individuals develop encultured, socialized, embodied, selves or identities that explain what they do (not do)

to the postulate that participation is more like getting caught anew in impossible circumstance that cannot be escaped
-- and discovering what can(not) be done under these circumstances

or (in other words)

that participation, because of inevitable uncertainties, always requires of participants ongoing transformation of earlier temporary selves or identities

The three parts

I - Social theory and the concern with cultural production in history

II - Rancière and the revolt against inculcation by the expert

III - Gundaker and one example of the officially ignorant teaching themselves dangerous knowledge

The challenge to socialization as necessary for social interaction
1. routine, face to face, everyday interaction
  Starting in the late 1940s, with a long unpublished but widely circulated paper by Harold Garfinkel on "The routine grounds of social action" ([1948] 2006), there developed a fundamental critique of the sense that pre-established knowledge is necessary for social action (i.e. action with other human beings that are both synchronous in time and place, or grounded in action that other human beings performed in the past of a particularly present time and place).
  
  From another philosopher: "Language in its authentic reality is born and lives and is like a perpetual combat and compromise between the desire to speak and the necessity of silence. Silence, ineffability, is a positive and intrinsic factor of language."" (Ortega y Gasset 1959: 5)
  
  In philosophy, Merleau-Ponty argued that personal experience and expression (precisely not a self or identity) both required a pre-organized field (e.g. a particular language) and could only happen through the manipulation of this field and its limitations: "What if language is expressive as much by what is between words than by words?" (1960: 5)
  
  The implications for social science, and for education, are profound and it took many years to establish that such concerns might give us a better handle on humanity and disentangle some of these implications
2. the openness of knowledge
  1. de Certeau, critiques of Bourdieu and Foucault, and the enunciation of a life (1984 [1980])
  2. James Boon and the extra-vagance of culture (1999)
3. The impossibility of knowledge
  1. In the introduction to the 2006 formal publication of Garfinkel's 1948 essay, Rawls argues that he refused to publish until he had empirical evidence of his conjuncture. This required new forms of sociological investigations and experiments with an emphasis on examining action directly--including the action of interpretation, not only in the abstract but in society. Thus a classical experiment, easy to replicate, in which people are asked to explain to a person who takes the stance of radical ignorance what was just said, and had been completely successful in moving forward a social interaction. Eventually, one will observe that there is no way to describe exhaustively what would need to be known if anything had to be known:
4. In fact the explanations are the product of Garfinkel's own (pedagogical) authority to require them, and the students' attempt to instruct him given the ignorance he convinced them he had. The explanations were not necessary to proceed smoothly. And so the students were annoyed.
5. In Garfinkel's later work (2002) a strong emphasis is placed on instruction triggered by the possibility of trouble. Plausibly, trouble is the product not of an absolute ignorance of rules but of an ignorance that has been made public and that triggers instruction (teaching) by those concern and until the trouble passes. No public acknowledgement, no trouble.
  1. what social scientists refer to as the reliance of "common sense" by participants is in fact a projection on their part. Participants, together, take the absence of trouble as allowing to remain within the world of action (whatever it might be at that time) without requiring an embedded instructional sequence which, because of its very concrete practicality, must delay the actual action: while telling someone how to do something, neither is quite doing it. Thus, arguably the functional need to spend as little time on instruction as possible--unless of course the division of labor in complex systems allow certain people (intellectuals, teachers, etc.) to spend their time doing nothing else but instruct people whose labor is not otherwise needed...
Rancière, Jacotot, and the power of experienced ignorance that leads to activity
1. a systematic critique of the "philosopher" (intellectual, researcher, critic), e.g. Plato/Socrates as in the Meno, as the philosophical discourse requires a distinction between special knowledge and common (not quite) knowledge: the "poor" cannot know in the way that the philosopher knows. Thus the philosopher (teacher, school system, democracy through its institutions) must instruct (develop personally and internationally) in the proper forms of (discursive) knowledge as it can be brought out and noticed by the philosopher.
  language does not unite people. On the contrary it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate.- but also puts them in a community of intelligence. (p. 58)
2. Jacotot as revolutionary (in the French 1789 basic sense), and as someone who found, without quite searching for it, in Flanders, a way of developing a social world (community of intelligence/practice?) where masters ignorant of the subject matter their students want to learn make it possible for these students to teach themselves this subject matter.
  1. Jacotot's method:
    1. Calipso
    2. non-readers of Chinese might practice their emancipatory education here.
  2. This is not an attack on subject matter or expertise. It is an attack on the need for expertise to be delivered by an expert expertly (through the development of discursive curricula, pedagogies, examinations, etc.) (p. 7)
  3. It is the recognition that:
    one could teach what one didn't know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of a master explicator. (p. 18)
  4. an opening to all sorts of research questions: where/how do people become expert at what they are not taught
    1. a preliminary search is for situations where this form of un-schooled expertise may be found cross-historically and cross-culturally.
      1. classically: the not-yet Protestants developing alternate forms of Christianity
      2. recently: putting together computers in garages and programming them
      3. tragically: learning how to use modern technologies for guerilla warfare
Gundaker and one instance of the will to learn that which one is forbidden to learn
1. note the exploratory method for which ethnography (even historical ethnography) is best suited: challenging that which we knew we knew by uncovering what earlier forms of knowledge ("e.g. slavery must lead to psychological collapse and passivity among the enslaved") systematically hid.
2. Gundaker is not writing about the acquire properties of "them" but rather about the constraints on the possibility of learning. This is a very general statement illustrated through the case studies. In these cases, numbers are not at issue. This could easily be developed in a new attack on unwitting racism through "practice" theorizing.
3. The optimism of all this must not make us blind, in turn, to the will not to teach so that competitors not learn, or, just as good, remain known as not having learned.
4. A note on Gundaker's methodology:
  1. not what "they" (or even what "some of them") did
  2. but an indication of the organization of the setting that enabled certain kinds of activities (and disabled others)

More on the education that escapes controls

Some questions
what remains of the notion of "acquisition" if one follows Rancière? how might one rewrite the common sense that some people are "educationally disadvanted"? if Teachers College is dedicated to "equity," what is one who appreciates Rancière to propose, practically?

from the postulate that participation in social interation requires:

and