June 10, 2013
The cardinal difficulty for any inquiry into education is that education lies within a class of analytic terms, alongside culture and biology (Ingold 2008), resistant to unitary formulation. The difficulty these intertwined terms share is in referring either to a public process, or to a personal product resulting from that process. Or, more confusingly, to both. In the following paragraphs I argue that an anthropology of education must hew closely to the initial formulation of the problem put forth by Edgar Hewett (1905); to study the public process of instruction in everyday life.
Most often, education has been taken up by researchers working in a psychological mode as the product of an individual student whose contours have been determined by formal schooling. The underlying assumptions, whether run through economic theory with its emphasis on maximizing utility or biological theory emphasizing innate capabilities, is that education is a product manufactured within the well characterized confines of the classroom. Thus, the product view of education research implies a set of theoretical assumptions and a venue for research, requiring, in turn, a methodological approach predicated on evaluation and measurement. As critiques have demonstrated (Wagner 1981:72; Varenne and McDermott 1992; Lave and McDermott 2002), the science of measurement leads inevitably to the production of successful or failed children, teachers and institutions.
Another approach to education negotiates the uncertain terrain between process and product by seeking to conceptualize the inculcation of habits and mores as a process of formation leading to the production of a stable identity as a learner or educated individual. This view draws heavily on a body of psychological literature (Thomas and Znaneicki 1918; Erikson 1939; Dollard 1935; Whiting 1941; Redfield et al. 1936; Herskovits 1937; Mead 1963; Bourdieu; Willis 1977; Heath 1983) contemporary to and intertwined with anthropological and sociological theory. In contrast to the product view of education, this view recognizes that identity formation, while durable, must be historicized and contextualized to fully reflect the complex lived realities of the people under study.
However, I propose we fully disambiguate the product from the process, and in doing so, narrow our analytic focus and broaden our theoretical gaze by following Hewett and conceptualizing education as an ongoing, open-ended process. Returning to Hewett, in the first paragraph of an article which prefigured much of the course the Anthropology of Education would follow in the ensuing 100 years, Edgar Hewett wrote of pedagogy and instruction:
The eminent place accorded education in our social organization makes imperative the closest investigation of every factor in educational practice. Instruction is a scientific work of the highest order. Pedagogy has no special body of facts or phenomena of its own as material for investigation; it depends for its structure on the conclusions of contributory sciences. Its ”sphere of influence” being coextensive with all human welfare, no necessity exists for examining limits, but emphasis must constantly be placed on organization.
This passage, which foreshadowed the difficult history of studying the role of “education in our social organization,” the peculiar role of instruction is noted by Hewett, yet not developed. His observation about paradoxical role of instruction lay dormant during the first and second generations of anthropology in America, but the question of instruction was raised again by two different groups in 1954.
First, the Committee on the Role of Education in American History, organized at Harvard University, posed the question: What was the role of education in shaping distinctly American institutions? This was a call to understand the reflexive process of instruction (pedagogy) through which Americans instruct one another on how to organize America. Phrased this way, the committee’s project on American education can be related what Geertz (1972) wrote of Deep Play; it is an instructive and metasocial commentary on how to organize Balineseness. Which is to say, the charge put forth by the committee was to demonstrate the poetics of instruction in the formation of distinctly American institutions, not to narrate the history of formal schooling. This project was pursued by Bernard Baily before being taken up by Lawrence Cremin. In a commentary on the body of Cremin’s work, McClintock (2009) asks why the project, and Cremin’s star, slipped from public attention so quickly after Cremin’s death. I wish to suggest that one answer to McClintock’s question is simply that the framing of the project demands an anthropological, not a historical, mode of inquiry, and if taken up this way Cremin’s project retains its power and necessity.
Second, at the Stanford Conference of 1954, Kimball spoke against the danger inherent in accepting formal schooling, with its focus on outcomes, products, measures and rankings, as the conceptual frame for an anthropology of education. The school, Kimball argued, is but one (and perhaps the least important) site of instructional activity. Anticipating Cremin’s (1976) ecological definition, Kimball argues that a full accounting of instructive processes must look at families, churches, and formal schooling as but one among many institutions in an ongoing process of instruction that begins at birth (or prior) and ends only with death. In calling for a revisiting of the natural history method, Kimball was joined by Kroeber who noted that social science (and here Kroeber intends the science of measurement) was a latecomer to anthropology, fitting the anthropological project in an uncertain, and altogether dangerous, manner.
It is these two strands we must weave together. Philosophically, both Cremin’s reworking of Dewey’s progressive schooling project as the work of an ecology of educative institutions and Rancière’s (1991) work on the productive aspect of ignorance can serve as guides. While I have discussed a few forgotten starting points, much work to build on has emerged over the last decades. An incomplete list might include: McClintock (2009) and Varenne’s (2007) recent reworking of Cremin’s concerns; Lave’s (2011) ongoing development of apprenticeship and skilled practice, Ingold’s work on attention (2001) and enskillment (2000); Henry (1965) on polyphasic learning; Garfinkel (1996) on instruction.
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