Anthropology and/as Education

Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351852395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is more to education than teaching and learning, and more to anthropology than making studies of other people's lives. Here Tim Ingold argues that both anthropology and education are ways of studying, and of leading life, with others. In this provocative book, he goes beyond an exploration of the interface between the disciplines of anthropology and education to claim their fundamental equivalence.

Taking inspiration from the writings of John Dewey, Ingold presents his argument in four close-knit chapters. Education, he contends, is not the transmission of authorised knowledge from one generation to the next but a way of attending to things, opening up paths of growth and discovery. What does this mean for the ways we think about study and the school, teaching and learning, and the freedoms they exemplify? And how does it bear on the practices of participation and observation, on ways of study in the field and in the school, on art and science, research and teaching, and the university?

Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is intended as much for educationalists as for anthropologists. It will appeal to all who are seeking alternatives to mainstream agendas in social and educational policy, including educators and students in philosophy, the social sciences, educational psychology, environmentalism and arts practice.

1
Against transmission

Leaving school

For those of us raised in nominally western or modern societies, the word ‘education’ most commonly summons up memories of going to school. We went there, so we recall, to be educated: to learn to read and write, to count and calculate, and by these means to become conversant with all the branches of knowledge, from the sciences to the arts and letters, that make up the legacy of our civilisation. Of our children, we might perhaps acknowledge that their education commences even before they go to school, in those pre-school institutions, traditionally known as nurseries and kindergartens, where the seeds of future learning are planted. And we might ourselves have benefited from education even after leaving school, by attending institutions going by a variety of names – colleges, universities, polytechnics – which claim to take us either ‘further’ or ‘higher’, depending on their academic status, along the road to civility. But the school, in our usual reckoning, remains the primary site of educational formation, in relation to which pre-school is understood as preparation and post-school as fulfilment. In a democratically constituted society, it is of course the responsibility of the state to ensure adequate educational provision for its citizens, and the minister of state for education is tasked, above all, with the oversight of schools, and with the regulation of what goes on in them, including what gets taught and how.

The practice of education and the institution of the school, in short, seem joined at the hip. You cannot apparently have one without the other. What are we to say, then, of societies without schools, or where only a minority enjoy the privilege of attending them? Is it acceptable to say of persons who have not been to school that they are uneducated, and therefore uncivilised? Such persons know a great deal that we, educated folk, do not. Anthropologists have gone to great lengths to document this knowledge, to reveal its detail, sophistication and accuracy, and to uncover the processes by which it is acquired. They have denounced, with good reason, the division of the peoples of the world into educated and uneducated, civilised and primitive. This is no more than a reflection, they say, of ethnocentric prejudice. Knowledge differs from culture to culture, as do the institutions that facilitate its passage from each generation to the next. The school is one such institution, but there are plenty of others. Is education, then, something that happens to every human being, living in society, as they pass from immaturity to maturity? Might it perhaps be listed alongside those capacities, including for language and symbolic thought, which are often considered to be the distinguishing marks of humanity? All animals learn, of course, in the sense of adjusting their ways of doing things in response to prevailing environmental conditions. It is quite another matter, however, to set up virtual scenarios in anticipation of conditions not currently prevalent but that might plausibly be encountered at some time in the future, so as to instruct novices in how to deal with them. Deliberate instruction of this kind – or what is generally known as pedagogy – may indeed be uniquely human.¹

Pedagogy is the art of teaching. There are all sorts of ways of distinguishing between teaching and learning, or of showing how the one exceeds the other, depending for example on whether the learner merely picks up habits from observations of what others do or has them deliberately demonstrated, or on whether the demonstration is framed in terms of rules or principles abstracted from contexts of application. Learning to make a flaked stone tool in the presence of a master knapper exemplifies the former; learning to navigate by means of star charts exemplifies the latter.² These distinctions, of great significance to students of comparative human and non-human behaviour, are not of immediate concern to me at this point. What does concern me is an assumption that runs through virtually all discussion of these matters, namely that education in its broadest sense is about the transmission of information.³ For those who hold that education takes place in schools, the school is taken to be a sequestered space in which knowledge is transmitted, in advance of its application when students take it out into the world beyond. For those who hold that education is a practice of pedagogy universal to humans, whether they attend school or not, the same logic applies. The school may not be the only kind of institution vested with a pedagogic purpose, but alternative institutional practices ranging from storytelling to ritual initiation may still be modelled on it, at least in analysis, and credited with an equivalent function. Thus they may be said to operate in a ‘school-like’ way, to transmit the legacy of custom, morality and belief that adds up to what we call a ‘culture’ to each successive generation, such that it may subsequently be expressed and enacted in the practice of everyday life.

My aim in this chapter is to argue against the idea of transmission, to show that this is not the way in which people ordinarily come to know what they do, that indeed it seriously distorts the purpose and meaning of education. This, in turn, will lay the foundation for my next chapter, in which I shall argue that education is really about attending to things, and to the world. In short, I want to prove that education is a practice of attention, not of transmission – that it is through attention that knowledge is both generated and carried on. To make the case against transmission, I begin with the writings of John Dewey, pragmatist and philosopher, justly regarded as the pre-eminent educational theorist of the early twentieth century, whose book Democracy and Education was published exactly a century ago.⁴

The continuity of life

Who would have thought of opening a treatise on education with the following sentence: ‘The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal’?⁵ Dewey’s point of departure is not the school, nor the people, nor even humanity. Rather than starting from the idea of education as schooling and then extending out to wider domains of human and even non-human culture, Dewey proceeds in quite the opposite direction. To understand what education is about, he says, the first thing to which we have to attend is the nature of life. We have to understand how plants and animals differ from stones. The stone, beaten by the elements, wears away or even breaks apart. But living things, quite to the contrary, take in the elemental energies and substances – light, moisture and earth – and turn them into a force for their own growth and self-renewal. Yet they cannot keep this up indefinitely, nor can they proceed in isolation. Every life is tasked with bringing other lives into being and with sustaining them for however long it takes for the latter, in turn, to engender further life. The continuity of the life process is therefore not individual but social. And education in its broadest sense, according to Dewey, is ‘the means of this social continuity of life’.⁶ Wherever and whenever life is going on, so too is education. It is going on, more narrowly, in spheres of human life and in the latter, most particularly, in the school.

Yet the school, far from realising the educational imperative in its purest form, is but one of many means for securing social continuity, and a relatively superficial one at that, prone to the distortion that comes from isolating the informational content of knowledge from the life-experience through which, and only through which, it can take on any kind of meaning. Indeed education in the sense Dewey intended is more likely to be going on beyond the school than within its walls. What is truly essential to education, for Dewey, is not formal pedagogy, mediated through such specialised cognitive instruments as language and symbolic representation, but transmission and communication. These are not just means that make it possible for social life to go on; they are of the essence of social life itself. ‘Society’, says Dewey, ‘not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication’.⁷ Now at first glance, this assertion seems to fly in the face of my own ambition for this chapter, which is precisely to argue against the idea of education as a process of transmission, and by implication of communication. I aim to show that transmission is the death of education, and that it takes the very heart out of social life. How, then, can I possibly adduce Dewey in my support? To answer this question, we need to take a closer look at the meanings of these key terms, communication and transmission. For the senses in which Dewey employs them are not at all the same as those in common use today, inflected as they have been by the revolutions in informatics and communications technology that dominated the second half of the twentieth century.

Let me start with ‘communication’. For most of us today, this has to do with conveying information, or sending messages. I have something to impart: I encode it in some physical form that allows it to be conveyed to you with minimal distortion; you receive the package and decode the contents. Ideally, you should then end up in possession of exactly the same information as I began with. You may, in return, send something back; we could then speak of communication as the exchange of information. But this is not how Dewey understands the term. Noting the affinity between the words, ‘communication’, ‘community’ and ‘common’, he is interested in how people with different experiences of life can reach an accord – a degree of like-mindedness that allows them to carry on their lives together.⁸ Perhaps, following medieval precedent, one could turn ‘common’ into a verb; to communicate would then be ‘to common’.⁹ In contexts of education, this commoning is above all an achievement of persons of different generations. Its educative power, furthermore, lies in the fact that information does not pass from head to head without distortion. For if I am to share my experience with you, it is not enough to package and send it as it is. You might receive the package, but will be none the wiser for it. For sharing to be educative, I have to make an imaginative effort to cast my experience in ways that can join with yours, so that we can – in a sense – travel the same paths and, in so doing, make meaning together.¹⁰ It is not that you end with a piece of knowledge implanted in your mind that once had belonged only to me; rather we come into a concordance that is new to both of us. Education is transformative.

Commoning and variation

Now what education is to the continuity of life, in Dewey’s usage, communication is to transmission. The one is the means to the other. Though Dewey takes less care to define ‘transmission’ than he does ‘communication’, it is clear that the one thing he does not mean by the term is what it is conventionally taken to mean nowadays, namely the conveyance, from one generation to the next, of a corpus of instructions and representations for the conduct of a form of life. Transmission is possible, Dewey argues, because lives overlap, because as some grow older and eventually die, others are already born and growing up. It is through participation in each other’s lives – through the ongoing and unrelenting efforts of young and old, immature and mature, to reach a concordance of sorts – that education proceeds and the knowledge, values, beliefs and practices of a society are perpetuated. Indeed Dewey is insistent that only if there is participation on both sides can education be carried on. Senior and junior parties must share a stake in the outcome. If they do not, then what we have is not education but what Dewey calls ‘training’. You can train a domestic animal to behave in the way you want by rewarding it, for example, with morsels of food. But so long as the animal’s interest is in the food, not in the service rendered to its master, then this does not amount to education. All too often, Dewey laments, the young of our own kind are similarly treated, the child ‘trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being’.¹¹ Insofar as such training moulds the raw material of immature humans to a pre-existent design, while it might replicate the design, it serves no educational purpose whatsoever.

This is the moment to introduce a third term which, alongside communication and transmission, plays a key role in Dewey’s philosophy of education. This is ‘environment’. As communication is the commoning of life and transmission its perpetuation, so environment is its variation. That is to say, it is not simply what surrounds the individual, or the sum total of encompassing conditions. What makes an environment is the way in which these conditions are drawn, over time, into a pattern of conjoint activity. Imagine an astronomer, gazing at the stars. For him the stars, however remote, are part of the environment – they are of concern to him. And being of concern, they cause him to vary as his gaze wanders from star to star. Reasoning from this example, Dewey concludes that ‘the things with which a man varies are his genuine environment’.¹² They go along with him, and vary as he does, in accordance with his inclinations and dispositions. One way of putting this is in terms of question and answer. The stars question the astronomer, they arouse his curiosity, and he is moved to respond. This response is not just a reaction, as if to a disturbance of vision that irrupts into consciousness, but an answering that prolongs the astronomer’s own tendency, which lies in the desire to know them better. We might say, as indeed Dewey does, that the astronomer corresponds with the stars. The promise of education lies in the capacity to respond and to be responded to: without such ‘response ability’, as we might call it, education would be impossible.¹³ The idea of response ability is key to my argument in this book, and is one to which I shall return. For the present, I would like to conclude this section by establishing the link between communication as commoning and environment as variation.

The point I want to emphasise is that there is no contradiction, as might appear at first glance, between these two terms. Rather, commoning and variation are co-dependent. On the one hand, there can be no movement, growth or life in the sharing of experience unless there is variation in what each participant brings into it. The achievement of commonality is not the discovery of what individuals have in common to begin with: it is a continual creation, not a regress to an origin. In the absence of variation, the only difference could be between those with more endowments and those with less, and education – as a direct transfer of knowledge and values from the former to the latter – would be reduced to training. As Dewey is at pains to stress, immaturity is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Against transmission
• 2 For attention
• 3 Education in the minor key
• 4 Anthropology, art and the university
• Coda
• References
• Index