These three lectures were presented at Beijing Normal University in March 2001. I intended them to be a general introduction to the main features of America and its educational systems for a foreign audience I imagined to have little knowledge of American constitutional history and current controversies. In the process of writing these lectures, I found myself playing the possibilities implicit in the word "constitution" as it is normally used in political speech and as it is technically used in ethnomethodology. This might be a way to develop the theory of culture (speech, discourse) as action, locally and globally.

I - America as Cultural Object The public school as solution and problem
II - The culture of American education Individual merit for a democratic community
III - Issues in policy and research An anthropological perspective