Cross-cultural and Historical Perspectives on the Consequences of Education: Implications for the Future

1
Cross-cultural and Historical Perspectives on
the Consequences of Education Implications for
the Future

• Michael Cole, University of California, San
  Diego

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Considering Basic ConceptsCulture

• Culture
• The entire body of socially inherited past human
  accomplishments that serves as the resources for
  the current life of a social group ordinarily
  thought of as the inhabitants of a country or
  region
• The tending of something
• Worshipful homage

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Considering Basic ConceptsEducation

• The systematic instruction, schooling, or
  training given to the young in preparation for
  the work of life (OED, 1971, p. 833) and
• To educe, the initial meaning of which was to
  elicit or develop from a condition of latent,
  rudimentary, or merely potential existence (OED,
  1971, p. 834).
• Common emphasis on raising the young and
  underspecification of methods for doing so

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Considering Basic ConceptsCross-cultural and
Historical

• Basic disagreements about extent to which
  cross-cultural research is simultaneously
  cross-historical.
• Does socio-cultural evolution equal progress?
• Are consequences of historical change general or
  specific?
• Answers to these questions shape conclusions
  about culture variation and education in a
  variety of ways

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History, Social Differentiation Is Education a
Universal feature of cutlure?

• One popular view education, applies equally
  across all societies at all times because one of
  the fundamental characteristics of human
  civilization is a concern for the preparation of
  the next generation (Reagan 2000), p. xiii).
• This view equates education and enculturation.
• Denies the relevance of historical change
• Leads to use of hedge terms such as informal or
  education in the broadest sense.
• My view the forms of education have changed
  historically and so have the forms of
  enculturation

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Some Relevant Historical Changes

• Small, face-to-face societies
• J. Bruner the process by which implicit
  culture is acquired by the individual ... is
  such that awareness and verbal formulation are
  intrinsically difficult (p. 58).
• in watching thousands of feet of film (about
  life among the Kung San Bushmen), one sees no
  explicit teaching in the sense of a session out
  of the context of action to teach the child a
  particular thing. It is all implicit. (p. 59).

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Small Face-to-Face Societies Continued

• M. Fortes. Emphasizes that in Taleland, the
  social sphere of the adult and child is unitary
  and undivided.... As between adults and children,
  in Tale society, the social sphere is
  differentiated only in terms of relative
  capacity. All participate it the same culture,
  the same round of life, but in varying degrees,
  corresponding to the stage of physical and mental
  development...
• 4. Survey of 76 African societies education
  cannot (and indeed should not) be separated from
  life itself (, Reagan, 2000, p. 29),

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Rudimentary Forms of Separation Between
Enculturation and Education

• Where hunter-gathering becomes partially
  displaced by agriculture, but villages remain
  isolated and small, rites de passage expand into
  bush schools.
• Children separated under supervision of selected
  elders to acquire basic social and economic
  knowledge for period of 4-5 years

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Social Accumulation, Differentiation, and the
Advent of Schooling

• Bronze age in Euphrates valley and environs gave
  rise to new mode of life CSTEP.
• Requirements of coordination and control include
  invention of writing system for purposes of
  record keeping.
• First institutions recognizable as schools
  appear, a development which repeats itself in
  China perhaps a millenimum later

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Earliest Known Example of a Schoolroom from
Sumer, circa 3000 BC
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Key Characteristics of Early Schooling

• 1. New form of social organization
• Separating generations
• High student/teacher ratio
• 2. New Form of Mediated Discourse (writing)
• 3. New Form of Social Differentation The
  literal, visible rise, of a middle class
• 4. Special ideological self-aggrandizement

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The Consequences of Such Schooling
I have seen how the belaboured man is belaboured
thou should set thy heart in pursuit of writing
... Behold there is nothing which surpasses
writing ... I have seen the metalwork at his work
at the mouth of the furnace. His fingers were
somewhat like crocodiles he stank more than
fish-roe ... The small building contractor
carries mud ... He is dirtier than vines or pigs
from treading under his mud. His clothes are
stiff with clay ... Behold, there is no
profession free of a boss except the scribe, he
is the boss ... Behold, here is no scribe who
lacks food from the property of the House of the
King life property, health! .... (Quoted in
(Donaldson 1978), p. 84-85)
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Schools in Large Agrarian Societies

• Schooling serves primarily for the acquisition
  of virtue (LeVine White)
• Close association between schooling and religions
  of the book, but literacy is highly restricted.
  Koranrecitation.
• Schooling continues to be highly gender related
• Practical skills province of a very few

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Schooling in Industrializing Societies

1. The school has been internally organized to
   include age grading, permanent buildings
   designed for this purpose, with sequentially
   organized curricula based on level of difficulty
2. The incorporation of schools into larger
   bureaucratic institutions so that the teacher is
   effectively demoted from master to a low level
   functionary in an explicitly standardized form of
   instruction
3. The re-definition of schooling as an instrument
   of public policy and preparation for specific
   forms of economic activity manpower
   development
4. The extension of schooling to previously excluded
   populations, most notably women and the poor.
5. Traditional forms continue to exist, now as
   expression of community values left behind.

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Consequences of Education in Post-Colonial
Societies

• During colonial period, education seen as tool of
  colonial power, secular missionaries of European
  civilization (A second wave of troops)
• Forms of education identical to those in use in
  Europe and North America, including hand-me-down
  textbooks

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Formulations of the Post-Colonial Policy and its
Foundations UNESCO
the wide diffusion of culture, and the education
of human beings for justice and liberty and
peace, are indispensable for the dignity of man
(UNESCO 1951), frontpiece) ...ignorance is not
an isolated fact, but one aspect of general
backwardness which has many features, like
paucity of production, insignificant exports,
poor transport and communications, deficient
capital and income, etc. (UNESCO, 1951, p. 4)
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Post-Colonial Policy and its Foundations
Developmental Social Science

1. Daniel Lerner The uneducated lack empathy and
   ability to take anothers perspective. Empathy
   is an indispensable skill for moving people out
   of traditional settings... Our interest is to
   clarify the process whereby the high empathizer
   tends to become also the cash customer, the radio
   listener, the voter." (Lerner, 1958, p. 50).
2. These ideas embodied in scales of modernity which
   correlated positively with schooling

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Post-Colonial Policy and its Foundations
Developmental Psychology

• Two decades of research using psycho- logical
  tasks suggested that, despite some disclaimers,
  elementary education required to achieve pattern
  of cognitive development found in industrialized
  countries
• Examples from both Piagetian research and
  research in learning theory traditions
• Hallpike (1979) uses this evidence to argue that
  primitives, do indeed, think like children.

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Post-Colonial Policy and its Foundations
Developmental Psychology Doubts

• Are the results of school-non-school comparisons
  logically defensible?
• Irvine on conservation shifting procedures,
  shifting results
• Sharp et al on changes in structure of the
  lexicon are differences procedure specific
  (duck/swim/fowl)?
• Wagner on development of memory for location the
  materials are familiar, but what about the
  procedures?

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Example from Wagner memory study
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The Flawed Logic of Cross-Cultural Comparisons of
Cognitive Performance

1. When, except in school or on a quiz show, does
   one encounter such a task such as those
   discussed? Might it not be the case that in
   school children learn relatively restricted
   cognitive skills and do not undergo any general
   cognitive change?
2. The logic of comparative work demands that we
   find tasks that schooled and unschooled children
   encounter with equal frequency, and then
   demonstrate that children who go to school solve
   the problem in more sophisticated ways tied to
   specifically their schooling. Failure to find
   tasks of equal familiarity, in effect, meant that
   we were treating psychological tasks as neutral
   with respect to their contexts of use, when this
   was patently false.

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Responding to the Challenge of Comparative Work
on Consequences of Schooling

• Acknowledge social ecologies where learning in
  school is likely to fit life circumstances
• ... the information-processing skills which
  school attendance seems to foster could be useful
  in a variety of tasks demanded by modern states,
  including clerical and management skills in
  bureaucratic enterprises, or the lower-level
  skills of record keeping in an agricultural
  cooperative or a well-baby clinic (Sharp, Cole et
  al., 1979, p. 84).

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Responding to the Challenge of Comparative Work
on Consequences of Schooling- Continued

• Seek examples of activities apparently shared in
  and out of school, and assess different
  consequences of engaging in them in the two
  contexts Nunes and colleagues on mathematics
  learned outside of school clearly a cognitive
  task
• In this case, logically identical problems shown
  to be responded to differently, with schooling at
  low levels often producing less effective results.

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Broadening the Search for Consequences
Childrearing

• Robert LeVine and colleagues follow the path not
  taken from experimental work. Their starting
  point is demography, not psychology. They propose
  a set of consequences that impact childrearing
  and its consequences.
• Focus on 1)new discourse skills relevant to
  bureaucratic settings, 2)models of teaching/
  learning including ability to adopt both teacher
  and student role and 3) acceptance of information
  through mass media and its ideological
  underpinnings

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LeVine et al Model for Consequences of Schooling
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Cultural Variations Involving Industrially
Advanced Nations

• 1. Two major kinds of comparisons, between nation
  states and within nation states.
• Each kind of comparison involves difficult
  methodological problems that limit conclusions
  regarding culture and education

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Cross-National Studies

• For past 20 years, performance of school leavers
  has been a major issue leading to sophisticated
  cross-national comparative studies.
• This work aided by presence of a common task
  across cultures. The curricula from country to
  country are closely related to modern disciplines
  and virtually identical

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TIMSS Math/Science Comparisons

• Began with only a few countries and has now
  expanded to more than two dozen
• Quantitative comparisons are easy to make, their
  explanations are far more difficult to agree
  upon.
• Following slides, taken from TIMSS researcher
  James Stigler at UCLA give a flavor of
  quantitative results for 8th grade.

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Algebra
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Geometry
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Data Representation
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Overall Performance
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Explaining the Differences. Whats Cultural?

• Based on ethnographic analysis within German,
  American, and Japanese classrooms, Stigler and
  Hiebert conclude
• 1. German teaching focuses on developing advanced
  procedures. The teachers lead the students
  through the development of procedures, including
  their rationale and the general classes of
  problems for which they are appropriate.
• 2. The Japanese teachers organize structured
  problem solving. They present demanding problems
  and organize the students to engage in active
  problem solving. Their major role is to design
  and orchestrate the lessons
• 3. The U.S. teachers seek to have their students
  learn terms and practice procedures. The content
  of the lessons is less demanding and less
  mathematical reasoning is expected

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Cross-National Comparisons Factors Operating
Outside Classrooms

• Amount of time spent in the classroom doing
  mathematics
• Resources devoted to education co-vary with
  performance across societies
• Educational level of parents, amount of time
  spent doing homework, and respect accorded the
  teaching profession all co-vary with performance
• Belief in effort versus natural endowment,
  characteristic of Japanese, another, co-varying,
  cultural factors

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Within-Country Variations in Culture

• Issue of within-country cultural variations in
  school performance is painful subject all over
  the industrialized world.
• Issues complicated by deep divisions over social
  policies stemming from the consequences when
  colonial peoples from over there now appear
  over here.
• Covariation of cultural, ethnic, economic issues
  makes intellectual problems as difficult as
  political ones

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Varying Responses Within the U.S

• 1. Historically, invocation of separate but
  equal schools, Americas response to the end of
  slavery and imposition of de facto apartheid.
  Still separate, never equal.
• 2. Adapt school classroom cultures to
  incorporate local cultural practices either as
  bridge to mastery of local educational norms or
  as policy promoting bilingual/biculturalism.
• 3. Obliterate the cultural barriers between home
  and school by various means inviting parents to
  teach, inviting teachers into home and
  communities to find local funds of knowledge, use
  of new communications technologies to open
  classrooms to the world.
• 4. Impose local national cultural and linguistic
  standards in an attempt to obliterate cultural
  variation

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Two Perplexing Contradictory Tendencies

• 1. Centralized standardization versus
  decentralized variation.
• a) The intensification of a trend tends toward
  ever more restrictive demands for
  standardization, increasing value of high-level
  certification, and hierarchicalization of society
  based upon educational achievement versus
• b) a trend toward decentralized control at all
  educational levels emphasizing collaborative
  problem solving, teamwork, that appears to mimic
  and perhaps serve changing models of work

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Contradictory Tendencies- Continued

• 2. Separation versus embeddedness
• The rise of cities and centralized state
  apparatuses, has been associated with separation
  of the school from society producing a form of
  efficiency in the transmission of technical
  skills deemed essential to the societys
  maintenance but a the cost of encapsulation of
  school-based learning and devaluation of
  knowledge acquired in other settings.
• Revulsion at the disutilities of this system have
  produced efforts to re-integrate the school into
  the community, and the rise of both alternative
  conceptions of education and alternative theories
  of learning (e.g., communities of learners,
  cultural-model-based approaches to education

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By Way of a Conclusion
To a very great extent, the outcome with respect
to the two issues I have singled out to end this
discussion will depend on the nature of society
that emerges from the current round of
globalized, just-in-time, more-or-less
instantaneous interactions at - a - distance
that have come to be the hallmark of modern life.
Sumer was the perhaps the most totalitarian
society of all time. If the model of education it
promoted continues to dominate the world, it
bodes ill for us all, because that form of
education has brought us to the brink of
self-extermination. But whether, and how, a more
horizontally organized, distributed, democratic
and locally controlled form of societal
interaction and enabling forms of education can
compete with the Leviathan of history is highly
uncertain. That alternative will be, if and when
it comes into being, a hybrid of new and old
forms, of the standardized and the locally
adapted. It will eschew the notion of human
education as the preparation of children to
triumph over nature and teach us how to live
within, as a part of nature, including natures
multicolored, multicultural, enormously
heterogeneous forms of society.