Masemann, Vandra Lee. (1999) “Culture and Education” in Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, Robert F. Arnove and Carlos Alberto Torres, eds. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. (pp. 115-133)
Anthropology as the provider of an ethnographic approach to the study of education and schooling that is more micro in its investigations, less generalizable, but distinct, and therefore valuable as a comparative tool in regard to more common methodologies. Masemann espouses critical and/or neo-Marxist approaches to ethnographic research on comparative education, rather than reliance on phenomenological or participant subjective reality perspectives.
p. 115: “It is argued that a critical or neo-Marxist approach is necessary to delineate the connections between the microlevel of the local school experience and the macrolevel of structural forces at the global level that are shaping the “delivery” and the experience of education in every country in even the most remote regions.” In addition, a cultural approach to the study of comparative education is important to combat some increasing trends in the economistic analysis of school effectiveness that rest on productivity-oriented criteria, an analysis that is used on every level of education from early elementary school up to the tertiary level.”
THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
Many definitions of culture – concerned with actions, ideas, artifacts, which individuals in the tradition concerned learn, share, and value. Culture has mental, social, linguistic, and physical aspects. Culture is no longer thought of as the homogeneous thing it formerly was (colonial anthropology-era).
p. 116: “There is still, however, support for the idea that although groups of people may not exhibit identical forms of behavior, they may possess similar kinds of “control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions . . .for the governing of behavior”.”
Enculturation – the process of learning how to be a competent member of a specific culture or group.
Socialization – the general process of learning human culture.
Acculturation – process of cultural transfer from one group to another.
Intercultural/multicultural – connotations of cross-group transfer (ala acculturation), with political overtones of remapping cultural lines into more pluralist renderings of society.
Margaret Mead’s definition of education – page 116-117: “. . .the cultural process, the way in which each newborn human infant, born with a potentiality for learning greater than that of any other mammal, is transformed into a full member of a specific human society, sharing with the other members a specific human culture.”
Many educators distinguish between socialization and education. For Mead this is not so.
Yehudi Cohen
Socialization – “ . . . the activities that are devoted to the inculcation and elicitation of basic motivational and cognitive patterns through ongoing and spontaneous interaction with parents, siblings, kinsmen, and other members of the community.” (p. 117)
Education – “ . . .the inculcation of standardized and stereotyped knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes by means of standardized and stereotyped procedures.” (p. 117)
For Cohen, socialization is a quantitative accretion of culture, the development of the individual related to how kinship relations coincide with personal relations in homes and communities.
CULTURAL VALUES
Education is a process wherein the community attempts to change/improve those aspects of an individual’s person that are changeable/improvable.
Masemann asks what the orientation of a society/culture is, and from Kluckhohn says that this will impact what forms “education” takes in that society/culture. (1) what is the relationship of human beings to nature – subjugation? Harmony? Dominance? (2) what is the temporal focus of human life – to the past? To the present? To the future?; (3) what is the valued modality of human activity – being? being-in-becoming? or doing?; (4) what is the valued modality of people’s relationship to other people – lineality – ties to ancestors? Collaterality – ties to their own generation? Individualism – ties to themselves?
Kluckhohn saw the values described above as socially constructed, though personally mobile – as seen in people in America, for example, who shift socio-economic status – their orientation to the broader society/culture will shift.
CULTURE AND EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY
Romenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Steiner, Montessori, and Dewey are cited as leaders in European and North American education circles whose ideas showcase the ways in which societal orientations toward education change. So, too, is Paolo Freire – with his focus on adults, and the underlying concept that learning and education need not stop, but is ongoing.
p. 120: Children’s “experience of and reactions to their education are not grounded only in culture and values that are perceived in the liberal tradition as unconnected to the material basis of their society (the world of work), but these experiences are fundamentally shaped by the economic basis of their neighborhood, community, region, or country and ultimately the global economy.”
EVOLUTIONISM AND COLONIALISM
Evolutionism – an idea of early anthropologists (Edward Tyler, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer) which held that societies could be ranked in stages or order of complexity and development, such that, for example, a hunter-gatherer group would be determined to be a kind of “early stage” society, one which, were it to evolve as had other societies, would develop. Of course, this view privileged the rationality and scientism of European societies – top of the development chart for human life. This kind of Social Darwinism has given way to more complex ways of viewing human life, but science and rationality are still near the top of any list for what makes for complex society.
Education was advanced in Western societies as a means toward the very kind of development Tyler, et al championed. Even as anthropology has gotten more “eclectic,” as Masemann states it, education remains a social Darwinian concept. And colonial education, in particular, is seen as a form of social engineering that deliberately sought to maintain local populations at less developed levels, such that they could not function in metropole society, and thus had to remain where they were from, and stay at the level the colonial masters defined for them.
Colonial education advanced, but “standard schooling” also puts forth (hidden curriculum-like) status markers re: issues like gender, race, class, etc. This is where the social Darwinism becomes silent social engineering.
Johann Galtung – focused on center-periphery theory in dealing with education. Galtung “sees structural domination as made up of three processes – exploitation, fragmentation, and penetration – and notes that it is still in place wherever the Western model of technical-economic development is accepted and the periphery depends on the center to supply something that the periphery thinks is indispensable and unavailable elsewhere.” (pp. 122-123)
Archie Mafeje, Gail Kelly and Arturo Escobar are mentioned as other anthropologist/cultural studies types who could be useful to read.
FUNCTIONALISM AND SCIENTISM
Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown – anthropologists who promulgated the functionalist creed.
Malinowski – societies had to have institutions that served the functional needs of the human beings in that society. Ethnography was one way in which to identify the ways in which society met its members’ functional needs.
Radcliffe-Brown used an analogy to define his functionalism – social institutions played roles akin to body organs – each had to do its piece to keep society functioning in a healthy manner.
Functionalism became the operative paradigm in educational research in the 1900s.
Masemann quotes Archie Mafeje on the insidiousness of the functionalist argument, and what it did to indigenous societies in colonial circumstances: page 125: the anthropologists “decision to leave their desks and disappear into the jungles of Africa, South America, and Asia were not determined by love of unknown natives, but rather by the imperatives of European development, including intellectual curiosity and growing impatience with speculative theories of the nineteenth-century evolutionists.”
For Mafeje, the notion that science permits understanding and provides knowledge of life is only one piece of what positivist science would prefer to see as a one-piece puzzle. For Mafeje, though, science is also influenced by life, surprised by the contradictions in nature, unable to explain all - so how valuable is science, and why speak authoritatively (not to say with certainty) about its ways of knowing when other non-positivist ways have existed for understanding life from pluralistic, cultural perspectives.
SCHOOL ETHNOGRAPHY
A 1970s approach borne of social upheaval and the emergent perspective that students were actors in their own education, thus to know what schooling as education was about, one had to find out what schools were deemed to be by those attending them. George and Louise Spindler are cited as early champions.
Masemann espouses use of ethnographic methods to, for example, look at child socialization and cognition across cultures. Comparative study of schools, as an interface between socialization (micro-level; personal) and society’s formal demands on children, is enhanced when multiple levels can be analyzed, as is possible with ethnographic approaches. Schools can be studied as a piece of a holistic society (town, urban, rural area). Schools as formal institutions can yield insight into other such institutions in society, and other issues, such as the construction of ”underachievement”.
Masemann states that the theme of the chapter is immanent functionalism – presumably inherent functionality – the study of something through an at least implicit functional lens. She describes such ethnography as limited in ways similar to how colonial anthropology was limited – and “othering” of the subject, a lack of will to fully subject the issue at hand to analysis – including the functional aspects of schools. For her, school ethnographies are too often microcosmic, and do not take into account enough of the broader societal picture, nor the broader global picture. Through her neo-Marxist lens, Masemann states, “Thus school ethnography has become a technique widely used in colleges of education, but it has become deracinated from its places in the history of anthropological theory.” (page 128)
For Masemann, school ethnography will eventually fall to the power of statistical research, with its connections to formal education and modernization.
p. 128: “ . . . the value of neo-Marxist approaches [critical ethnography] to ethnography lies in the researcher’s eschewing the assumptions of neutrality and objectivity of functionalist positivistic approaches and assuming the autonomy and isolation of the school and classroom. Neo-Marxist approaches, instead, call for researchers to seize the opportunity of doing a political analysis in which their role, as well as that of the teacher, the student, and educational equality itself, is defined in new ways.”
Masemann on Holland, Levinson, and Foley: “. . .their book also provides a very complete bibliography of the most recent works in this field. In their introduction, they review the more recent developments in critical education studies, social reproduction, cultural reproduction, the cultural difference approach, ethnography and cultural reproduction, and cultural studies and the cultural production of the educated person. They also examine the Western schooling paradigm in global context and explore “how concepts of the ‘educated person’ are produced and negotiated between state discourses and local practice.” Their work provides a very comprehensive and forward-looking assessment of the state of the art of critical educational studies.”
CONCLUSION
Mentions Dottie, Bradley Levinson, and Douglas Foley’s book as a highpoint in ethnographic approaches to education research in the 1980s and 1990s.
p. 130: “From a Marxist perspective, there is a curious absence of focus on the dialectical struggle in comparative education, as if somehow the only struggle had been between East and West, when the [scientistic vs. alternative] epistemological struggle is being waged at a deeper cultural level between the North and the South and between industrial forms of culture and the more local, rooted forms of culture.”
Home-schoolers are mentioned as one community that seems to be resisting state hegemony over education practices. So, too, are religiously schooled peoples, and those attending alternative philosophy schools.
p. 130: “. . .attempts to equalize educational opportunity on a global scale have led to the ignoring of local cultural values and traditional forms of knowledge and ways of thinking, which are in danger of becoming extinct. Anthropological studies of education in every country and setting can help bear witness to the rich diversity of modes of cultural transmission and the great variety of experiences that can be called educational.”
