return to general introduction

Let us look again at Cremin's definition.

There actually is an easy part. It is the part about education as "effort": this word echoes, for me all that has been written over the past 30 years at least about social life involving heavy work in conjunction with not always helpful others.

I will leave aside "systematic" for today and will focus on what is truly difficult: education is a deliberate effort. What can we, anthropologists at least, do with "deliberation"?

Note first some property of a focus on deliberation. I would say that

• it moves attention from learning to teaching
• thus frees the object of teaching (say a child in school, an adolescent among her peers) from "having to have learned": after all we all know that not all teaching produces the intended "learning";
• thus fully allows for, and in fact makes central, what, in recent years, as appeared in our literature as
  • resistance
  • play
  • bricolage
  • construction
  • change
• without necessary implying that what the "object of instruction" has constructed will in fact have any consequence apart from what others will notice, allow, authorize.

In my mind, "deliberation" is not a matter of quasi-rational strategizing.

Rather, "deliberation" refers to the activity of the participants as they process any of the aspects of a current situation in the real time of its continuing evolution while making something in conjunction with other participants that may or may not correspond to any of the "intentions" of any of the local agents.

THIS IS WORK!

I have been lucky to work recently with several excellent students and we have been developing these ideas together. I will present here only a small piece the much more extensive research done in a small Jesuit school for migrant children by James Mullooly, now at California State University, Fresno. (transcript of this sequence)

Note:

the import is not that these students are "Mexican-Americans" that the school is a "Catholic" school that any of the participants have any of thousands of other properties that might appear to answer any "why" these students and teachers do what they do

the import is that a lesson was in process and all had acknowledged it one student started an improvised joke and it was jointly performed, as all jokes must be according to a rather constrained set of requirements, in at least three different ways: he who told he who acknowledged they who did not acknowledge the person with authority actively ignored the joking (though she had specifically been told by her own supervisor that she should not) the lesson continued (and the school)

 

This may not appear the most striking example of the way deliberation transforms initial conditions. In fact it is such an example but at such a local level that it is easy to miss that the students were taking complex conditions into account and were making something that possibly made the lesson less boring than it might have been. By actively ignoring what was happening in front of her eyes, the teacher was also making something altogether unique (and of course the school was itself a most obvious product in the history of the town and the religious order that sponsored it).

To think about joking as a form of "determined effort to evoke an attitude" may seem far-fetched but it is allowed by Cremin. Certainly the case of the establishment of a new school with a different curriculum and pedagogy would seem much less far-fetched. In another dissertation recently completed, Portia Sabin has given examples of college students telling each other how to conduct their friendships and love affairs and she found a quote from Cremin about "adolescent enthusiasms" being themselves educative. Cremin liked to think about the popular media as distinctively educative and I may end with the recent sensation Sex and the City not only as a way for some media deliberately to educate about new interpretations of women sexuality and relationships but in fact also as a depiction of a continuing process of education that these women were giving each other--often in the radical uncertainty that precisely require never ceasing deliberate effort.