Fifty Years of Anthropology and Education 1950-2000

A Spindler Anthology

George and Loui Spindler, George Spindler

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135661441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

George and Louise Spindler are widely regarded as significant founders of the field of educational anthropology. This book brings together their best, most seminal work from the last 50 years--a time frame representing the developmental epoch of the field--and binds them together with a master commentary by George Spindler. Previously scattered over a wide range of publications, the articles collected here allow for a unified view of the Spindlers' work and of the development of the field. The book opens with an insightful Foreword by Henry T. Trueba, a fascinating piece titled "A Life With Anthropology and Education: Interviews With George and Louise Spindler by Ray McDermott and Frederick Erickson, " and George Spindler's "Previews" essay which gives the reader a grasp of the whole to which the parts of the book contribute. These pieces frame and contextualize the work that follows. In Part I, Character Defining, many of the major themes of this volume are first encountered; this section sets the stage for what follows. Part II, Comparisons, focuses on comparison, which the Spindlers view as essential to an anthropological approach. Part III, Ethnography in Action, is devoted to the explicit exposition of ethnographic methods (though actually every piece in the book is a demonstration of method). Part IV, American Culture, moves from a traditional representation of American Culture to a processual analysis of how the culture is transmitted in real situations, and finally to an interpretation of right-wing actions that seem to constitute a reactive movement; the implications for education are pursued. Part V, Cultural Therapy, explains what cultural therapy is and how it may be applied to teachers and students. The volume concludes with Part VI, Orientation, Susan Parman's overview of the works of the Spindlers that spans their whole career.

Part I
CHARACTER DEFINITION

In Part I, many of the major themes of this volume are first encountered. The 1954 conference of anthropologists and educators is overviewed. Much of what we have all been up to since that time is anticipated but much was unanticipated, such as the vast demographic changes in the population of the United States in favor of nonEuropean-Americans, and the role of ethnography as anthropology’s major gift to education. The Third Burton Lecture, chapter 2, is included, in which I engage for the first but not last time with Roger Harker, the fifth-grade male teacher who has served as the vehicle for so many of my discussions of how schools in the United States function. The theme of cultural conflicts and discrepancies is established as a major orientation for much that follows. The conflict theme is pursued in the next chapter on education in a transforming American culture. In the chapter on Beth Anne, the ways in which values held by teachers influence perception, in this instance, in the selection of the “best adjusted” child in the school, are analyzed.

In other articles in Part I, cultural therapy first appears as a result of work with “Roger Harker,” George Spindler’s first major case study, and conflicts in culture as they affect schools becomes a theme. The way in which schools fail minority groups is brought into focus in chapter 5. Part I ends with defining the teacher as a cultural agent and education as a process of cultural transmission. This part sets the stage for much that follows.

1
Anthropology and Education: An Overview (1955)

George D.Spindler

Although no “educational anthropology” exists at present, and this conference is not aimed at its creation, the purpose of this overview is to survey the articulation of these two fields. Education is not listed in Anthropology Today (Kroeber, 1953) as a field of application for anthropology. There are only rare instances of self-conscious attention to the mutual relevance of these two fields in the various interdisciplinary symposia. Few professional anthropologists are required by the institutional definition of their positions to interact with professional educationists, and only a handful of joint appointments in education and anthropology exists in American colleges and universities.

Despite this, some educational philosophers cite the concept of culture as most important in their systematic thinking, modern texts used in the training of teachers abound with references to anthropological literature, elementary school teachers include projects on “Peoples in Other Lands” and “Our Indian Friends,” and a growing number of departments of anthropology are offering courses with the specific needs of teachersin- training in mind. But most surprising is the fact that the relations between these two fields have a history in this country extending back to at least 1904, when Hewett wrote his first pieces on education for the American Anthropologist (1904, 1905).

These introductory statements suggest that a whole symposium of papers could be devoted to the systematic explication of these sometimes obscure and unacknowledged relationships. Only this overview paper will serve this interest directly. Its purpose is to outline the parts of both anthropology and education as they articulate into one mutually relevant framework of interests, trace briefly the history of such articulations, indicate what anthropologists have written about education and what educators have used of what anthropologists have written, and describe certain potentials and problems that exist in the relationships. It follows on the introductory statement by Dean Quillen of the problems in education for which anthropological help is sought.

The purpose of this overview is thus sharply different from that of the rest of the papers in this symposium. It is about the relations of education and anthropology. The other papers are designed to put into motion some applications of mutual relevance to both fields. They are experimental and question-raising, therefore, since no articulated education anthropology structure exists from which they could draw. Most of them move well out toward the margins, away from traditional anthropological interests. This is not necessarily good, but it is assuredly inevitable.

RELEVANT FIELDS AND INTERESTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Some of anthropology articulates, or can articulate, with education, and some of it does not. Anthropology as the “study of man,” with its traditional interests in cultural variability, culture history—both ethnological and archeological—language, race, and human evolution, is admittedly a prime potential contributor to a good general education. While no claim is made here that anthropology should necessarily become the skeleton or the core of a complete “liberal arts” education at the secondary school or college level, it seems clear that no other existing discipline provides an integration, however loose, of so much that is important concerning man and his manifold behaviors. The study of man thus broadly conceived makes it possible to bridge the gap between the human animal and the human being, to conceive of both the relativity and universality of human behavior and propositions about it, to project human affairs upon a time plane that stretches far into the past and future, and turns the focus on the basic round of life and man’s relation to nature.

It is not even necessary, as is often done, to argue that the vicarious crosscultural experience afforded by an anthropological Cook’s tour leads to a better understanding of our own culture. It does or can lead to a more universalistic understanding of human life, and this is more important. Anything else is a byproduct.

The implication is clear that anthropology should be used as a contribution to general education more widely than it is. It should not be taught as it is to young anthropologists-in-training or as it usually is at the college level—as an introduction to a discipline—but rather as an introduction to a new perspective on human life. It should also be taught at the secondary school level, possibly under some more conventional and already existing rubric (Spindler, 1946). It is being taught at the elementary school level when teachers develop lesson units or activities centering on American Indian tribes—but sometimes badly because the teachers have had little or no exposure to anthropology as such and consequently contravene the primary goals of this kind of curriculum design. Anthropologists have been aware of these possible contributions of their field to general education and have written about it (Ehrich, 1947; Howells, 1952) but they have only rarely done anything about it, because they conceive of themselves primarily as producers of data and contributors to science and secondarily as teachers or curriculum designers.

In the sense outlined above, all of anthropology is relevant to education. From this point on, the relationships real and potential are more selective. But these selections need not be made only from the sociocultural side of the discipline. Indeed, the contribution of physical anthropology to education had an early and significant beginning in Montessori’s fascinating applications in a “pedagogical anthropology” (Montessori, 1913). To be sure, Maria Montessori, though armed with millimetric tape measures and anthropometers, called for recognition of educable man as a “speaking animal” and a “social animal,” and in her practiced philosophy of education anticipated Goldenweiser’s arguments for an anthropologically sound and progressive “education for social participation” (Goldenweiser, 1939). But more of Montessori later.

Aside from Montessori the most important contribution of physical anthropology to education has been on the subject of race, and the relationships —rather the lack of them—between race, culture, and intelligence. Anthropological perspectives on the meaning of race and the myth of racial superiority have been popularized by Ethel Alpenfels in her capacity as staff anthropologist for the Bureau for Intercultural Education, and have become familiar to every well-grounded social studies teacher through this and other agencies. Otto Klineberg has given us the classic treatment on relationships between race, culture, and I.Q. (1935), that has wide circulation in an encapsulated form in a UNESCO pamphlet (1951) and a symposium edited by Linton (1947).

What has not been used sufficiently in education from physical anthropology are the techniques, concepts, and methodology concerning growth patterns, maturational sequences, sexual differences, and glandular processes that could add needed dimensions to the psychosomatic data of educational psychology. Nor have the school plant planners—a new specialization in education—yet consulted the physical anthropologists for ideas, methods, or facts on the anthropometry of the classroom. If anthropologists can design better bucket seats for flying boxcars, they can also design better desks for school children and contribute heretofore unconsidered applications to playground equipment, audiovisual devices, space-to-person ratios, and lavatories.

Directly relevant to the interests of this seminar-conference are the concepts and data of specialized and relatively new fields in anthropology, such as personality in culture and cultural dynamics. In fact, when anthropology-education relations are considered, this is usually where people in both disciplines begin to look first.

For some, interests in crosscultural education are identical with interests in crosscultural socialization. This creates confusion. Socialization of the child to human, group-accepted status is a total process of growth and adaptation. The center of the process is the child—adapting to an environment structured by culture, as well as by group size, climate, terrain, ecology, and the peculiar personalities of his always-unique parents or parental surrogates. Education is not this whole process. It is what is done to a child, by whom, under what conditions, and to what purpose. It is the process of transmitting culture—if we can think of culture as including skills, knowledge, attitudes, and values, as well as discrete elements of behavior. It is the culture of the human being— where culture is used as a verb.

There are many books, monographs, and articles by anthropologists reporting research on socialization of the child in environments structured by various cultural sets. The most recent significant comparative research is Whiting and Child’s Child Training and Personality (1953). There are relatively few studies on education. British anthropologists, with their functional predilections, have provided many of the most useful descriptive analyses of education as cultural transmission in particular cultural settings. One of the better studies by an American anthropologist in terms of application to the who, what, when, where questions has been produced by Pettit, as he summarizes and analyzes education in North American Indian cultures (Pettit, 1946). This work illustrates the kind of thing that needs to be done with more comparative crosscultural data.

This suggests the relevance of another field of anthropology— traditional ethnography—the factual core of cultural anthropology. Pettit drew his data from ethnographies written by others. The fact that he could do so is a tribute to the inclusiveness of good ethnography. But he had to search for the relevant facts and too often couldn’t find them, or could find only indirect allusions to a who, what, when, and how process in cultural transmission. The success of his search indicates that an ethnographic corpus lies waiting to be cannibalized by researchers interested in crosscultural education, but that more definitive and inclusive categories of observation need to be devised if future reports are to be of maximum use. Ethnography has produced the raw materials for more treatment than has been committed—and it also furnishes the sources for the vicarious culture shock that is an essential step in the education of a public school teacher.

That amorphous and loosely defined problem area in anthropology called cultural dynamics is the source of many relevances—most of them potential. If this field is seen as that concerned primarily with processes of culture change and stability, its relation to educationist interests is immediately clear. Change and stability must be mediated by what is transmitted from parent to child in the educative process. This transmission process is not seen as a causative variable—excepting within a limited interaction cycle. But unless this variable intervening between changes in conditions of life and the adaptations of people is understood, the “dynamic” part of cultural dynamics is left unilluminated. And the educative process can be understood better by viewing it as such an intervening variable, for then it is seen as an instrumentality that is sensitive to the cultural and extracultural exigencies under which it operates. Anthropologists have done little systematizing here. Herskovits has supplied one of the few explicit statements in his “Education and Cultural Dynamics” (1943).

One field of interest in anthropology that has realized relatively more of its potential in relation to educational problems is that of social structure. If the interests here are conceived as broadly relating to group alignments, prestige ranking, status and role interrelationships, and social control in the community context, all of the very useful work of the Warner group and other closely related efforts may be regarded as a contribution from this area. The contributors include, besides Warner, such workers as Allison Davis, Gardner, Dollard, Loeb, Withers, Useem, and many nonanthropologists who have been strongly influenced therein such as Havighurst, Taba, Hollingshead, the Lynds, et al. The relevance of this field to education, particularly with respect to a concept of social class that has been regularized by Warner and his associates, is indicated by two recent special issues of the Harvard Educational Review (1953) on the subject. No claim is made that this is exclusively an anthropological domain or contribution, but one of the mainsprings driving the interest and its application is fastened to an anthropological pivot.

In this instance the situation as it exists otherwise in the various potential or emergent articulations with education is reversed. More is known about how the educative process is affected by social class and community structure in Jonesville and Elmtown than in the nonliterate societies that arc the accustomed habitat of the anthropologists. To be sure, nonliterate societies rarely have social classes in the same sense that Jonesville has, but some do, and all have groups structured into a social organization. Whether this structure is formalized by a widely ramifying kinship system, or by rank, or by a complex political-social system, or is atomistic and individuated—the who, what, when, and why of education will reflect this structure at every turn. For the sake of a clearer concept of education as a sociocultural process something more should be known about these functional interrelationships between educative system, educative process, and social structure in non-Western and particularly smaller, simpler societies.

RELEVANT FIELDS AND INTERESTS IN EDUCATION

When the sights are turned on education, it becomes clear that there are more relevant problems and interests than anthropologists could begin to bear appropriate gifts to—even if they were so motivated. Some of the particularly significant problems have been succinctly described by James Quillen. Others have been listed by Fannie Shaftel in a memorandum circulated to the participants in this conference. The discussion below will approach some of these same problems from a different perspective and describe certain interests and fields in education in which these problems occur.

One of the areas within education that most obviously calls for an anthropological contribution is that of the “foundation” fields. These are designated by various names in teachers’ colleges and schools of education about the country. The general rubrics are social, psychological, philosophical, historical and comparative, and biological. They represent what is drawn into education as a science, and into education as a professional field, from the behavioral and social sciences, the humanities, and natural sciences, as their data and concepts are used in empirical and logico-deductive analyses of the educative process, and in the training of teachers.

Anthropology has only recently begun to make a significant contribution to these fields, largely because of its newness as an academic discipline. Within the social-behavioral foundations, educational psychology has clearly dominated the scene, partly because of a historical accident that institutionally wedded psychology and education rather early—at least in America—and partly because the problems of educational tests and measurements, principles of learning, and personality development have been naturals for psychological applications. In many teacher-training institutions psychology is still the only behavioral science explicitly recognized in the organization of professional education courses.

Of the various social sciences, education as a professional field has drawn from political science, economics, and jurisprudence, but particularly from sociology. Educational sociology has its own house organ, numerous texts bearing its name, and an impressive pile of research to its credit. Most foundation courses in professional education in the social area are called educational sociology. In a few places where teachers are trained in America—particularly at Teachers College at Columbia under the leadership of Lyman Bryson and now Solon T.Kimball, at New York University under Ethel Alpenfels, and at Chicago, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—an explicit anthropological contribution is integrated with those of other social sciences in the foundation program. Hunter College, in New York City, may soon be the site of an unusually wideranging curriculum of “foundational” education and anthropology (Rosenstiel, 1954), and New York University ‘s School of Education has a longstanding development of this sort. Courses in anthropology are required of teachers-in-training at some universities and colleges where there is no formalized integration of anthropological contributions with the foundation fields in education.

At Stanford, as an illustration of the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the foundation fields in teacher training, relevant materials are presented in three courses: “Social Foundations in Education”; “Cultural Transmission”; and “Social Anthropology in Education.” These courses are given under the aegis of a joint appointment in the School of Education and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and credit is given in both fields.

“Social Foundations in Education” is required of all upper division education students and all candidates for the Master of Arts degree in education as well as for the various professional credentials. It combines selected materials from sociology, anthropology, and social psychology. The anthropological contribution lies mainly in a systematic analysis of American cultural patterns and values as they bear directly upon the role and functions of the teacher and public school system. Crosscultural data are used here for illustrative purposes. Other topical areas covered include social class and education, problems in student-teacher communication, group stereotypes and prejudice in schools, the community context of the school, and the school as a social system.

“Cultural Transmission” is offered as a course for doctoral candidates, and is presented within the advanced social foundations sequence in education. Its coverage includes the construction of a frame of reference for viewing transmission and enculturation processes. This frame of reference is then used in the analysis of these processes in two nonliterate societies, one European society, and American society. The course ends with analysis of case studies of selected types of teachers and their classrooms, and schools, in our society. Sociometric, autobiographic, socioeconomic, observational, and community “social base” data are included in the case study materials.

“Social An...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Authors
• A Life With Anthropology and Education
• Previews
• Part I: Character Definition
• Part II: Comparisons
• Part III: Ethnography in Action
• Part IV: American Culture
• Part V: Cultural Therapy
• Part VI: Orientation
• Memoir
• Conclusion
• Sources