DRAFT COPY -- THE CULTURAL PRODUCTION OF THE EDUCATED PERSON WITHIN AND AGAINST SCHOOLING: AN INTRODUCTION
by Bradley Levinson and Dorothy Holland
***** I like the first three and a half pages, up to the developments in critical education perspectives section. It is offers a concise rationale for the need for an expansion in critical education theory beyond the urban west (whether the British urban arena, where class, race and gender dynamics are focused upon, or the American arena, where beyond ethnicity and cultural differences are focused upon).
***** Look for the Quantz 1992 article referred to in the footnote #26 on page 15. The article acknowledges Willis' recognition of the importance of history as an implicit category of analysis in critical school ethnography.
***** Look for works on social movement theory by Touraine and Melucci.
***** Look for works on Cultural Studies by Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler (1992), as well as a review of their book by Jameson (1993). Also look for Brantlinger and Greene.
***** Look for Fuller on extension of models of mass schooling into primarily Africa (1990).
***** See Keyes (1991) and Vaddhanaphuti (1991) on how state schools "reshape local worlds" in southeast Asia.
***** Look for work by Laura Rival (one of the authors in Bradley's compilation) on schooling among the Huaorani of Ecuador.
Definition of the "school" -- a broad one, "state organized or regulated institutions of intentional instruction. This study is not confined merely to the school. The 13 case studies take into account the actors (students, teachers, parents, administrators, regulators) for whom the school is the arena of education. The study broadens out beyond "education" as well in that the school is also a social space, negotiated by social actors who construct, resist, reproduce and produce the systems of domination and privilege that exist within the "school".
One key theoretical shift appears to be the sense in which Dottie and Bradley have utilized what they call the "culture-specific educated person" (in the theoretical framework of cultural production) to replace the structural "reproduction" of social reproduction theory. This seems to me to allow for an opening to forces such as colonialism and neo-colonialism to be examined. These colonialism forces (especially neo-colonial forces) have created a situation, especially for me in East and Southern Africa, where the school is creating an educated elite fully differentiated from the pre-colonial educated elite, therefore, social reproduction is not as useful a theory as it is in non-colonial environments.
Bradley and Dottie do a long-ish review of Bourdieu's work on cultural reproduction in French schools: as they differ from the Kabyle's "symbolic capital" to utilize "cultural capital" but only the cultural capital of the elite. The non-elite soon face social pressures to conform to the cultural norms of the elite (in clothing, music, art, language, etc. terms). This is not part of the social aspect of the work of schools, that is, schools are not set up to do this, thus it is not to e considered social reproduction. It is cultural.
The critiques of cultural and social reproduction theory are three: (1) it is almost devoid of analysis of race, gender, and age restrictions, choosing as its focus, class issues. This was addressed beginning by the early 1980s; (2) it is almost entirely Western, European-American in its focus. Studies are beginning to come in from non-Western nations, i.e. former colonial nations. In fact, this book is just such an effort at expanding the reproduction theory (through its most current manifestations of practice theory and cultural production theory); and, (3) reproduction theory soon became too deterministic and schematic, too structured. Little sense of resistance was described in the case studies of reproduction theory.
Next to be worked through is "cultural difference" studies, which are critiqued on the grounds that they essentialized the cultural practices of the minority groups which were shown in the studies to be not represented in the cultural makeup of schools, which tended to be white, middle-class, etc. in their cultural outlook (and expected all students, whether white, black, Hispanic, or other to be white, middle-class, etc....).
Dottie and Bradley shift into an examination of Paul Willis' "lads" and his cultural production theory. Willis, through the use of ethnographic techniques was able to observe and describe the ways in which the lower-class "lads" were active players in the school they attended, and how their position and actions helped to construct them as subjectivities different from how the school would have produced them "objectively". Though the "lads' did end up reproducing their social status, they did not do so passively, one of the major critiques of Bourdieu's reproduction theory. Willis is further credited with bringing the human agency inherent in cultural production into the theoretical foreground.
p. 13: "...we are forwarding the concept of cultural production (used more generally in the work of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and Anthony Giddens, more specifically in education first by Paul Willis, then by Weis, Holland and Eisenhart, and others) as a theoretical construct which allows us to portray and interpret the way people actively confront the ideological and material conditions presented by schooling. The concept is used to show how people creatively occupy the space of schooling, generating understandings and practices which may in fact move well beyond the school, transforming aspirations, household relations, local knowledges, and structures of power. This new stage of analysis and research is what we are referring to as "the cultural production of the educated person"."
p. 16: "Cultural production...provides a direction for understanding how human agency operates under powerful structural constraints." in footnote #28: "Cultural production can be seen as a specific form of practice theory which focuses upon cultural forms and emphasizes their import in the development of subjectivities."
Some examples of cultural forms -- the home (as seen in Levinson), commercial media (as seen in Holland and Eisenhart), and sports (as seen in Foley), lesbian versus hetero versus punk versus preppie versus hippie femininity (in Holland and Eisenhart), gay versus hetero versus jock versus preppie versus punk versus hippie masculinity (in Holland and Eisenhart).
p. 20: culture as something which may be produced even as it is reproduced, something which is no longer the static entity it appeared to be in social and cultural transmission studies.
p. 22: they give over an entire paragraph to Stuart Hall's Policing the Crisis, calling it "an outstanding example of a comprehensive approach to cultural studies." But he still fucked up on the statistics, and Dottie and Bradley don't mention this. Sure, the point was how the statistics represented something "official" which became something "lived" and "cultural" and this is important. Still, he fucked up the statistics.
I like the piece from page 26-27 about the need to look at schools as valid research sites, via works by Abu-Lughod (1993?), Lancaster (1992), and Maddox (1993), rather than assuming, especially in the non-Western setting, that since school shave been around for so long, that they are essentially the same everywhere. They are not the same.
Three theoretical advances are sought within this work: (1) broaden the insights of critical theory by situating it in the education arena, combining this with ethnographic detail taken from anthropology; (2) detach cultural production from social reproduction since cultural production occurs no matter the theoretical background of the reproductionist, whether Bourdieu, Habermas, or other; and, (3) realize that cultural production occurs not only in schools among students, but in schools among teachers, parents, administrators, coaches, etc., as well as outside of school among students, teachers, parents, et al.
p. 34: "Through their struggles to affect textbooks, curricula, policies, moral statements, disciplinary procedures, and eligibility requirements, all sorts of actors attempt to produce "educated persons" in line with distinct cultural and political-economic interests. It is in this sense that schools in their totality constitute a site of cultural production."
Bradley's final section is very interesting! He addresses the question of how such "privileged" persons as PhD candidates and PhD holders dare to speak for the disenfranchised, yet how, if they do so speak they become an active part of that which they wish to depict and analyze (and how easily analyzed are one's own actions when one is still engaged in them, as well as in analyzing the others involved). Bradley also questions whether there is any use for a critically engaged educational anthropology. So do I.
