Short description

1. The issues: Education
   1. Less a matter of definition
   2. than a matter of
      1. the discovery of the organization of human interaction
      2. as it is being transformed
2. The issues: Ethnography
   1. as method to discover systematically what human beings can do
      1. not a set of techniques but
      2. an epistemological choice
      3. for (social) scientific knowledge
   2. thus a tool for discovering education and, reflexively, finding out more exactly what, exactly is education and what we can do about it.

Longer description

1. The issues, more technically
   1. "practice" as what human beings as ethnographers can observe of human beings where human beings live
      1. bodies together
      2. in place
      3. and in time
   2. "community" as the set of other human beings that human beings never fail to get entangled with (and are necessary for them to be fully human)
   3. "transformation" of communities and selves as human beings entangle themselves with each other and their history (ecology as transformed by earlier entanglements
   4. "culture" as a way of talking about the special properties of entanglements at the type of experience and observation
2. Thus "Education"
   1. as the inevitable step within the production of entanglements, the resistance to entanglements, etc.
   2. Some negatives. Education, for me and in this course, is NOT about:
      1. learning as a necessary step in human development
         1. the debate between Chomsky (and any theories of cognitive structures) and Skinner (and any theories of an initial blank state on which local conditions write themselves) is irrelevant to the extent that it addresses only the (early) development of the individual rather than the production of the conditions as well as the transformation of these conditions
      2. learning as a functional requirement for life in society
         1. this course will address questions often classified as "socialization" or "enculturation" but it actually is a critique of this classification. I am less interested in the production of selves by society than by the production of society by "I's"
            1. see Varenne's development of G. H. Mead's provocative pages on the distinction between 'I' and 'me' if you are puzzled by the last statement.

What we are going to do, practically

1. Outline of the course
2. Requirements