“Remember, you may have more instruction than I have, but you are not more educated.” (Varenne’s grandmother, who left school at the 6th grade, circa 1917, on the occasion of his Ph.D.)
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. The volume makes this point both theoretically and through exemplary case studies of people transforming each other in various settings, parts of the world, and times.
We make the argument as anthropologists grounded in a long tradition insisting that close attention be paid to what human beings actually do, in their everyday lives as well as the more extraordinary moments when they set the conditions of their everyday lives. We make this argument on the basis of research among the enslaved, the shamed, the confused, and all those who struggle. Everywhere we find and document productive, indeed transformative, activity that is only limited by the active work of others who may not acknowledge the transformation. We make the argument as anthropologists even though anthropologists, among the social scientists, may have been those who developed most thoroughly a sense that is now common among all behavioral scientists, as well as much of the media, political classes, and so on: human beings are to be seen as the product of their history or, most common sensically, of their “culture.” In recent years, many anthropologists have tried to separate themselves of much that is now part of this discourse of culture. Besides not having had much success moving the public discourse, they have not quite faced the core problem that make writing about culture dangerous. To simplify, anthropologists and those whom they inspire, too often, continue to assume that people learn, and, most fatefully, that they act in terms of their learning. Much of the literature that passes for “critical,” even as it uses words like discourse, hegemony, history, habitus, agency, etc., takes the reader back regularly to an actor who has been shaped–in the past–, who is the determined product of circumstances.
There is an alternative. Provocatively, we start with generative, resistant, and productive ignorance. We explore the opportunities opened by looking for people struggling with ignorance. We are able to show people analyzing conditions, marshaling resources, and, in many different ways, deliberately attempting to change–and then starting over again whether they have produced new conditions, or whether return action by others have brought them back to where they were. Puzzling out the unknown, we argue, may be the most common human experience. If so, then action is best approached as the willful seeking of ways to deal with difficulties, with tensions between what one wishes to do and what one is asked to do, with oppression, as well as, for the privileged, with the resistance to oppression. Interestingly, this brings us close to a set of questions most often asked by those who approach seriously “education” as a joint process of deliberate, mutual, transformation that is a fundamental aspect of human activity.
There is a problem here that must be cleared right away. Work by social scientists said to be “on education” is mostly about schools, and secondarily about learning. It is very rarely about families, college dorms, hospitals and the like. And it is even more rarely about teaching outside the classroom and by those without the state-sponsored authority to do so. We dare say that it is rarely about education as an everyday process in which all human beings are always engaged. The volume brings together scholars convinced of the usefulness of focusing on education as a total and continual process. First, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers provide four framing essays, two in introduction, and two in conclusion. Second, nine young anthropologists constitute the core of the volume as they present exemplary case studies from around the world, in situations of great oppression, and in situations close to the source of various forms of hegemony.
The collapsing of education into schooling was true when Lawrence Cremin “ conceived of education ... as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended" (1976: 27). He was asking social scientists to follow his lead and conduct research on education from a much broader point of view than they had until then. A quarter century later, equating education with schooling remains the dominant mode in the research and popular literature. We must go beyond this. We must do so to respect the activity of all people everywhere, to deepen our intellectual understandings, as well as better to ground school reform proposals. Everywhere and continually, human beings must labor to educate each other even as they struggle against each other–or simply live with each other. It is not wrong to say that human beings, as individuals, learn throughout their lives and in all contexts. But it must also be affirmed that they teach each other, in the details of everyday life, in the planning of overall careers, and in the convincing of others to transform institutional constraints.
The papers in the volume illustrate how all people do educate themselves in a wide series of settings and historical conditions–including the most oppressive ones. The papers present accounts of the effort to educate among enslaved people in the early United States, Hmong girls in Thailand, Black adolescent boys in San Francisco, poor shamed Brazilian women, students in a small liberal arts college, teachers and administrators in a Jesuit school for Mexican immigrants, health care professionals in Sweden, activists in New Zealand, museum curators and the people who visit their exhibits. All these people are shown in deliberate efforts to transform themselves, their consociates, and their conditions.
Building on Cremin and others before him, we confront education directly as a general human activity with schooling, in all its forms, as a specialized sub-set. We do not ignore schooling, but we approach it as the product of a broader collective process through which polities educate themselves in distributing their educative labors across various institutions. Even those who must remain concerned with schools and bureaucratized teaching, whether as policy makers, administrators or teachers, must get to understand more profoundly the limitations of their own work. It is only to the extent that good accounts of the general process are available that one will gain clearer understandings of what schools, in their particular times and places, can, and cannot, do.
An emphasis on education as an everyday process, we argue, brings out phenomena that have been systematically hidden by normal research. It has been a cliche of the past half-century that social science research must not “blame the victims” or treat people as “cultural dopes.” It has been much more difficult for critical writing to achieve this goal. Arguably, almost all available theories include a theory of (mis-)learning that explains apparent assent to difficult conditions as resulting from a secondary learned acceptance of the conditions. If this were the case, then we must say that participants cannot possibly actively and indeed deliberately analyze their conditions, and construct something along with others that can stand against others, including hostile others. Participants are made passive carriers of what was once called “cultures of poverty.” Instead, we intend to out the collective efforts to deal with difficult conditions and transform them through everyday learning and teaching. Our goal is to show that all people, everywhere, are involved in such efforts.
The overall task has both a theoretical and empirical aspects. Theoretically, we search determinedly for better ways to represent the activity of the people we account for. Our intellectual roots spring out of Bateson, de Certeau, Lave, as they, in different ways, respond to Bourdieu, Foucault, and others. All have sought to stress the practical activity of human beings. All have seen the importance of knowledge, learning, and movement through organized polities. But they have not been equally successful at analyzing the mechanisms that lead to the transformation of conditions. Accounting for agency and constraints in term of education may do so, we believe. We build our case empirically by showing how our expanded theoretical focus highlights much that earlier accounts kept hidden. The contributors all document how the people they report on continually conduct practical analyses of conditions, attempt to change their behavior, and, most importantly, attempt to change the behavior of others. From our point of view, the important matter to notice when looking at human beings when they are oppressed by other human beings is not that they do not routinely revolt. It is not either that they can be shown to resist those who oppress them. It is rather that they can be observed deliberately looking for ways to build a different life than the one their masters are making for them. This is true whatever the setting or the relationship of the person to local power and authority structures.
The book has four main sections. To set the tone for the volume, an introductory section includes a reprinting of one of Cremin’s seminal essays. It also includes an essay by Hervé Varenne developing the general framework for the case studies. The main section of the volume is made up of two sections and nine case studies about particular times, places, and institutional settings. Each section is introduced by Varenne who provides further framing. As anthropologists, all contributors operate from the premise that the general can only be grasped through the vicissitudes of the particular. The first of these sections (Section II) includes case studies of local populations in the most difficult of circumstances (slavery, ethnic oppression, poverty) and emphasize the work of the people to educate themselves about these circumstances. The second of these sections (Section III) generalizes the analysis to the broadest of social processes (including national policies about health care, or the construction of a state as a “bicultural” nation). The populations may be larger, the stakes may be higher, and the effects of specific acts more uncertain, but the process of collective deliberate seeking in uncertainty is similar. In the final, concluding, section (Section IV) Ray McDermott and Robbie McClintock address again the general issues from a slightly different angle.
In keeping with classic anthropological understandings, all cases studies, even when they address matters of national concerns, proceed from the close observation of local activity to the not so local matters that can be shown specifically to impact local action. This inductive process, we believe, reveals much that remains hidden in large scale sociological or economic surveys. We are also convinced of the importance of comparative work across national boundaries and time periods. It is essential not to stay solely within the United States precisely because its institutional and ideological frameworks are so powerful that they do limit possibilities we should pay attention to.
We start with four cases that take us into the world of unauthorized education. First, Gundaker reminds us of the efforts of slaves in early America to teach themselves how to read on the way to learning about the world into which they were thrust and the place they might make for themselves when their masters were not watching. Second, Johnson presents Hmong girls who, as they move through their wardrobes, discover the global world within which they are beginning to make their lives. Third, Seyer-Ochi follows African American youths in San Francisco navigating the city and making their own paths through it. Fourth, Bartlett reports on Brazilian women struggling to avoid and overcome what they experience as the shame of illiteracy, in part by enrolling in adult literacy programs.
The second set of case studies documents uncontrolled educational efforts in and about the most dominant of modern institutions: schools, colleges, museums, hospitals, nation-states. Sabin asks a question that is rarely presented as an educational one: where, when, and how, do people in America find out about “friendship” and “love”? To answer this, she takes us into the world of college students. Mullooly asks a related one: how do school administrators maintain the threatened reputation of their school? He takes us into the faculty meetings of a Jesuit Middle School for Mexican migrants. Lorimer then broadens our perspective by showing how a Chicago museum exhibit is an occasion for deliberate efforts to learn and teach–both for the curators and for the visitors. The final two papers move us to a broader stage where large populations struggle with the new conditions they have made for themselves, and the new uncertainties that technological and political developments produce. Stratton sketches the complexity of the settings for educational efforts that modern technologies offer for those who, as they age in Sweden, find it harder to hear, or to be acknowledged as hearing. Finally, Gershon looks at the impact of the redefinition of New Zealand as “Aotearoa/New Zealand,” a bicultural (Maori/Pakeha) nation in which people from Samoa and other Pacific islands must now express themselves.