Anthropology & Education, Essay Example

1.B.

The concept of the hidden curriculum is decisive for issues of education and socio-anthropological issues in general, in so far as it, in essence, conveys an unconscious element: the concept addresses those presuppositions that underlie our social discourse, presuppositions of which we are not explicitly aware. More specifically, the hidden curriculum can be understood as endeavoring to promote these same presuppositions. To the extent that education is crucial to the development of the human being – as Jules Henry phrases it, “learning to learn has been and continues to be Homo sapiens’ most formidable evolutionary task” (53) – the presence of a clandestine or hidden element to our learning clearly requires us to be conscious of this same element, since it influences social and personal development.

The notion that education contains a hidden element is found in the notion of curriculum: when one establishes what is to be learned, one is necessarily practicing a process of exclusion. The formulation of a curriculum confers values to certain areas that are deemed worthy to be learned; the question of the hidden curriculum, in this sense, is essentially the same as the following question: how do we decide what is valuable to be learned and what is not to be learned?

Henry lucidly expresses this notion as follows: “education is always against some things and for others.” (54) Accordingly, education is not merely “positive” or “affirmative” in the sense that it delineates a positive curriculum of areas that should be studied; it also contains a negative element, being against “some things” as Henry phrases it. Understanding how this distinction is made, i.e., uncovering the hidden curriculum as “negative” body of knowledge that is excluded from the “positive” body of knowledge, is equivalent to understanding what particular social discourses value, as well as how these values are then promoted through the perpetuation of education.

There is thus an ethical element also crucial to the hidden curriculum: are we aware of the practices of exclusion that inform the education system and our practices of human learning? Henry frames this ethical problem in the following manner: “the function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them.” (55) Henry presents the reader with a more critical approach to the question: Henry emphasizes precisely this element of exclusion. In other words, determining the curriculum of education is always an act of limitation: it is stressing what is worthy of being learned.

This becomes an ethical, sociological and anthropological problem to the extent that it imposes limitations; in Henry’s interpretation, it imposes a devastating limitation, the limitation on human creativity: “Creative intellect is mysterious, devious, and irritating.” (56) Henry, in other words, identifies a further tension in the notion of education and thus by extension the hidden curriculum that is the material excluded from education: an antagonism between education and creativity. Education in the form of curriculum determines what is to be learned: it thereby restricts creativity to developments only within the context of this prescribed set of rules.

Accordingly, the problems of the hidden curriculum are multiple and interrelated. Firstly, it addresses that education is by definition an exclusionary process, eliminating various bodies of knowledge from study. Secondly, it therefore perpetuates a particular world-view that is consistent with these conferred values. Thirdly, it in consequence restricts creativity, since the transgressing of such borders is prohibited by the nature of education in general. Perhaps, however, this picture of education does not necessarily have to be so pessimistic: understanding the “hidden curriculum” and its effects within education makes us conscious of the unconscious, and thereby encourages us to re-think our processes of learning.

2.B.

The distinction John Ogbu develops in his text between different forms of minority group is the direct consequence of a seeming paradox in his research: namely, there is not a consistent set of data that would assert that all minority groups perform poorly in education when these groups are confronted with a dominant majority. This has a direct consequence to the analysis of minority groups in relation to education and society in general: it is an over-simplification to employ the terms “minority group” and “majority group” in order to understand the object of study, in so far as the experiences of minority groups radically vary.

It is this conclusion that leads Ogbu to propose a further conceptual nuance within the concept of minority group. As Ogbu explains the logic behind the introduction of this nuance, “minority status involves complex realities that affect the relationship between the culture and language of the minority and those of the dominant groups and thereby influence the school adjustment and learning of the minority.” (192) Such a distinction within the concept of minority group thus intends to address precisely this “complex reality.”

Ogbu proposes three classifications of minority groups, reflecting different

“complex realities”: a) autonomous, b) immigrant or voluntary, and c) castelike or involuntary minorities.” (192) The autonomous group, as Ogbu defines it, is a quantitative minority (192), i.e., all those, in the context of the United States, that do not belong to the dominant “White” majority. In so far as this autonomous group contains all minority groups, it is not the focus of Ogbu’s analysis, since the latter is precisely concerned with making distinctions within minority groups: the key concepts in his reading are therefore voluntary and involuntary minorities. The voluntary group indicates those who have voluntarily arrived in America, in essence, willfully taking on the status of a minority, for example, Ogbu considers the Chinese minority group as exemplary of this type of minority group. In contrast, the involuntary minority group is a group whose presence in the United States is not the result of an autonomous decision: archetypical of this group is the African-American community, whose presence in the U.S. is the result of the historical legacy of slavery.

From this delimitation, Ogbu’s hypothesis is anticipated: the voluntary minority group is clearly more “successful” within the dominant majority culture, to the extent that their decision to join this culture is autonomous. Therefore, there is no inherent antagonism with the system; the system is, to paraphrase Ogbu’s research, an open system, one that provides opportunity. In contrast, to the involuntary group, the system is by definition oppressive: there is a socially produced antagonism to the system which is the result of the system’s historical aggression to the involuntary minority group. Accordingly, all aspects of the social structure such as education may not be perceived as means of improvement, but rather as yet another variation of the oppressive nature of the social structure as a whole. The poorer results of involuntary groups in education are therefore a result of this socio-historical antagonism, wherein the education system is construed as merely another means by which to continue socio-historical oppression, whereby the involuntary minority group continues to undergo a “linear acculturation or replacement of their cultural identity with White American cultural identity.” (198)

Obgu’s solution to this problem is multi-faceted; in brief, he proposes that the recognition of different types of minority groups is crucial to addressing the problem. Once this is established, “teachers and interventionists should study the histories and cultural adaptations of involuntary minorities” (201), thereby providing the teacher with a context with which to understand the particular involuntary minority group’s relation to the dominant system. This is most lucidly summarized in Ogbu’s phrase “accommodation without assimilation” (201): the point is not to assimilate the involuntary minority group’s identity, which is precisely one of the sources of their antagonism with the majority group, but rather to create a space within the broader discourse for the involuntary minority group. In other words, it requires the radical step of slowly eroding the hegemony of the majority group over social discourse and, in this case, education.

3.B.

Sherry Ortner’s text “Fieldwork in the Postcommunity” develops by challenging some of the methodological presuppositions existing in the area of ethnographic fieldwork, while also proposing an alternative approach. Ortner more specifically identifies a problem with the concept of “culture” as the object of study of fieldwork, offering the concept of “community” as more accurate concept.

In order to understand the reason for this conceptual shift, it is first necessary to understand the limitations Ortner identifies with the notion of culture. In essence, for Ortner, culture is simply too ambiguous a term: in her words, it refers to a “kind of ungrounded set of images.” Namely, when the ethnographer in fieldwork emphasizes the notion of culture, she is emphasizing some type of “image” of what constitutes a culture: in other words, she is presupposing her object of study. One begins, therefore, with an image or culture of a certain group, i.e., its fundamental norms and mores, its internal relations to group members alongside external relations to non-group members; the fieldwork, in essence, is so to speak “tacked on” to this already presupposed object of study. Clearly, this is problematic to the extent that it is a form of “begging the question”: fieldwork is already limiting itself in terms of the types of conclusions it can reach regarding its subject matter because it has already created a limited image of the subject matter itself.

Ortner, however, does not make the somewhat equally idealistic assumption that these images can merely be done away with: for, if this were the case, the ethnographer would not be able to delineate at the initial stage of fieldwork the precise group to be studied. What Ortner is calling for instead, is for a more flexible and heterogeneous approach to the object of study: as she writes it is “essential to keep those images attached to real lives, practices and systems of relations.” (166) This is a crucial point: it is not the images that determine how the “real lives, practices or systems of relations”, i.e., what Ortner terms “communities” are to be studied, but rather the exact opposite: the communities determine the images. This means that such “images” are essentially open to interpretation and revision, based on the community itself: culture essentializes the group in study, reducing them to some preconceived notions, whereas community, in contrast, thinks these images through the community, which means that preconceptions are replaced by a more “immanent” approach to the community being studied, allowing the community to affect the methodology of fieldwork itself, rather than a strict application of this methodology on the study-group.

This notion ties into Ortner’s concept of “postcommunity”, in so far as this concept represents the type of methodological shift Ortner is calling for. In her article she concentrates on studying her high school graduation class: this is a “postcommunity” in numerous senses. Firstly, the community no longer exists as clearly defined group: they no longer, perhaps, have clear relations in terms of space, as the high school class has dispersed all through the country. Secondly, the community is also one that existed in the past, as opposed to the present. The reason why this approach reflects the methodological change Ortner is calling for is that the loss of the spatial and temporal homogeneity of this community, since it no longer exists as a community, requires the anthropologist to abandon any presupposed notions of the community and thereby follow the real-life relations that now exist in this postcommunity. How the community realizes itself despite its loss of temporal and spatial homogeneity thus reflects the anthropologist’s task of not bringing any presuppositions into his or her study of the group in question: one must re-trace the relationships that hold the community together. Accordingly, the example of a postcommunity becomes a clear example of how the study of community should be studied: without methodological presuppositions of the “images” that are to be fit onto the group in question, but rather the reverse; understanding how the group understands its own “real lives, practices and relations.” (166)

Works Cited

Levinson, Bradley A.U. et al. (eds.) Schooling the Symbolic Animal: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.