Anthropological notes towards a theory of education

This is the introduction to the Berkeley version of this lecture

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What is an anthropologists to do with "education"?

Over the course of the history of the anthropology of education one could notice, to simplify and only focus on the most significant and paradigm defining research, three, stages:

1. education is really enculturation
2. education is "learning "
3. education is the product of continuing word by crowds in complex political relationships.

These three steps constitute major advances in the more exact mapping in much that must involve education. Each take what is best of the concerns of earlier generations and develop it but directly confronts "education" in a manner that does not reduce it to something else. What, indeed, are we to make of "education"? Or is it just a hook articulating a public language with a technical one?

I, too, may end up reducing education to something else, particulars if one comes from the philosophy of education. but I want to try by expanding on Cremin s definition of education by using recent developments in anthropology and sociology (though somewhat from the periphery of these disciplines). Cremin is famous for his attempt to distinguish education from schooling. I will also develop something less noticeable but perhaps wen more challenging the distinction between education and learning.

A detour in belated homage to Lawrence Cremin

I hope I can also assume that you have all heard of Lawrence Cremin and particularly his definition of education (Cremin 1978: 701).

Initially, as I understand it, Cremin was looking for a systematic criteria of inclusion and attention for histories of education The definition occurs in the middle of his career and justifies how he was writing his monumental work. The definition is famous for something that is very explicit but there is also there something implicit that may be equally useful. He argues that

1. a history of education cannot solely be a history of schooling.
2. if cannot either be a history g knowledge or its distribution and spread.

This is a hard definition for sociologists and anthropologists. I did not quite see how I could work with it when I first read it. And yet, on re-reading it many years later, I have come to see in it a challenge well worth taking.

Cremin, rather obviously to me, was trying to distinguish education from socialization and internalization--two concepts or, better, traditions of theorizing about the human condition with which he was fully conversant but that did not help him do justice to what had happened in the history of America. Education could be it, but what would education be, from a social scientific point of view (leaving aside the explicit philosophical humanism with which he was also, of course, fully conversant).

So he comes up with a definition that takes into account the complexities that social scientists had noticed, including much that anthropologists had written about families and communities.