Anthropological Perspectives

No generalization may be harder to challenge than the one about people being shaped into particular kinds of human beings through their experiences at particular times and with particular other human beings. And yet it must be challenged.

For it is also possible that human beings are not so much shaped as shaping, not so much transformed as transforming. It is possible that what is needed to account for humanity is less a theory of learning than a theory of education.

This special issue of the Teachers College Record makes this point both theoretically and through exemplary case studies of people transforming each other in various settings, parts of the world, and times.