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

Required:

•  Koyama, Jill Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010

on the School as cultural (arbitrary) constructed in an ongoing process form:

  1. from "learning" as unconscious processes producing uncriticized consequences
  2. to consequences as the product of ongoing work involving analysis, deliberation (conversations), decision, institutionalization, resistance, resistance to the resistance, reproduction/drift (evolution)
or, in Bourdieu's inimitable style:

• All pedagogic action is,

• objectively,

• symbolic violence

• insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary

• by an arbitrary power.

Bourdieu & Passeron ([1970] 1977: 5)

as long as one does not accept Bourdieu's hypothesis about "misknowing" and "habitus" while adding the ongoing work of imposition (and improvisation) to build particular schools

decorative bar

  1. The School America builds (Varenne & McDermott 1998)
    1. from overall sketches of school organization
    2. to cases of people dealing with ongoing difficulties
    3. looking for the mechanisms that produce the mechanism
  2. from history

    Where the School come from and how does it maintain itself?

    1. The School as product of discourse (ideology) translated into State policies and then animated into bureaucracies ("Departments of Education"), administrations, teachers unions and councils (not to mention 'normal schools' like Teachers College). So, in very much abbreviated form:
      1. ideology: all children should be educated by the State
      2. first animation: public schools funded through the State (early 19th century and ongoing debates about how the State should fund what)
      3. second animation: children's learning should be assessed (early 20th century and on going debates about the method of the assessment and its implications)
      4. translation: no children should be "left behind"
      5. new assessment, methods for rewarding/punishing teachers
    2. This is partially a historical question and particularly an ethnographic one
      1. What steps were taken, over the years to bring a current state into existence?
      2. What current steps are needed to keep alive what has been instituted?
    3. It is also a question about what people do with the efforts to maintain something that is, percisely, "arbitrary" (that is not quite in tune with one's experience)?
  3. to the details of the working of "governmentality" (power, authority)

    note how Koyama does not rely on explanations of the ubiquity of an arbitrary

    note how Koyama does not rely on explanations of the ubiquity of an arbitrary by invoking some "causality" (e.g. 'capitalism', 'neo-liberalism', etc.) or by assuming socialization or enculturation, or values, or an habitus somehow carried by individuals who "mis-know" their conditions. This is the major advance of Bourdieu allowed by the work of Bruno Latour (2005) who, building on Garfinkel (2002), emphasizes that everything human beings make has to be rebuilt in an ongoing fashion

    Koyama and the search for the mechanisms of enforcement of the arbitrary through a determined focus on the acts of those who directly respond to the enforcement and, often, dissemble or resist.

    methodological note:

    Koyama did not stay in one place but followed indexes to a few nodes in a network with possibly no boundary. As such, Koyama cannot generalize to a population (though other forms of research allows us to propose the extent of the population in time and place)

    1. Beyond determination and agency. Forward to taking seriously "conversation" as temporal process involving many people assembled for the purpose and becoming consociates to each other with various authority, power, and occasion to mandate, punish, disrupt, and propose alternatives
  4. Highlighting some of the consequences triggered (not "caused") by the inescapable acts of others-with-authority
    1. assistant principle "solution" to space limitation in his school
    2. parents requests for a school to remain "in need of help"
  5. "Animating" a local school (the mise-en-scène of a play)
    1. meetings by principals and their teachers figuring out what to do next and coming up with plans
    2. a teacher in her classroom and preparing lesson plans, etc.

      3. "agency" (e.g. identity, self, etc.)

      The local acting of the animation (from Koyama's ethnography)
    3. succeeding at being a "failing school" (Chapter 6 pp. 126ff)
    4. finding a room for the after school program (Chapter 5 pp. 98ff)
    5. facing parents (Chapter ??)