This is the ??? in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF4010 "Cultural & Social Bases of Education" ( )

• Ginsburg, Faye 1989 Constested lives: The abortion debate in an American community. Berkeley: University of California Press. (pp. 77-92 and 110 to 129)

• Greenhouse, Carol 1994 Law and community in three American towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Chapter 4, pp 117-132)

 

1. Given a large enough assemblage of people who have lived together for some time (and that assemblage does not have to be very large), all ethnographic evidence demonstrates that the people will begin to talk to each other, that is converse, about their life and, as time passes, these conversations will produce what can be labelled "ideologies," "religions," "creeds," etc.  These conversations, about everywhere and everywhen produce differences that may devolve into much strife. What Maybury-Lewis writes about small populations of Ge people in the Amazon, could be written about any other people:

   I could understand anything that was said in Sherente, but I could only get the gist of ... the formal speeches which Sherente frequently deliver ... If I turned to my neighbor for explanations ... they either repeated what had been said ... of 'explained' it by saying 'He is very angry' or 'He said very much'. (Maybury-Lewis 1967: xxii-xxix)

   Thus the need to focus on consciousness as a collective process that gives evidence for what is worth fighting about in some here and now.

2. Controversies about the future: what should be done, and by whom
   1. the regulation of abortion
   2. the Law and when to invoke it
3. "In the begining ..." (on myth and justification)
   1. Religion (of the culture, against the culture, for a culture)
   2. Politics (and deliberations/disputes/revolutions for and against this or that organization of life)
   3. Science (as dependent on particular forms of consciousness that allow, or not, activities considered scientific)
      1. Particle physics (dependent on expensive machines such as the CERN's Large Hadron Collider)
      2. Covid and its controversies
         1. the virus
         2. the vaccines
         3. the public health recommendations and their challenged authorities
4. Ideologies
   1. Languages and speaking
      1. instruction into speaking
         1. to children and foreigners
         2. injunctions against inappropriate words.

            As scholars, we must be mindful of our language and consider issues that may not be central to the questions you’re asking but might be impacting the individuals represented in your research. Many [academics] may just follow what the guidelines say, and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of information journals provide authors regarding specific factors to be mindful about and recommendations to consider. (Zajic 2024)

         3. language ideologies (what languages should be spoken, when, by whom, and with what consequences
   2. Curriculum and pedagogies
      1. Dewey's "Pedagogical Creed"
      2. forms of testing (when to test, what to test, how to test)