Cross-cultural and Historical Perspectives on the Consequences of Education

Michael Cole,  University of California, San Diego

(Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford University, Nov. 1, 2002)

 

            The intersection  of complex issues that I address in this talk requires that I I begin by establishing at least some general agreement about the key terms in my title, culture and education on the one hand, cross-cultural and historical on the other. Each is complex in its own right, and the combinations to which their various conjunctions give rise are an invitation to confusion or misunderstanding.

 

Culture and Education

Although it is famously difficult to define, at present, the term "culture" is generally used to refer to 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  (D'Andrade 1966). There is evidence of  the rudiments of culture in non-human species,  but human beings are unique in their dependence upon the medium of culture and the forms of organism-environment (Tomasello 1999) interactions that culture supports in order to sustain and reproduce themselves.

For purposes of thinking about culture and education, it is useful to begin by tracing the concept of culture as it has evolved since entering the English language from Latin and French many centuries ago. Contemporary  English language conceptions of culture originate in terms that refer to the process of helping things to grow: "Culture, in all of its early uses, was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals" (Williams 1973) , p. 87). From earliest times, this notion of culture included a general theory for how to promote growth: Create an artificial environment in which young organisms could be provided optimal conditions to develop. Such tending required tools, both material (hoes) and mental (the knowledge that one does not plant until winter is over). These tools are perfected over generations and designed for the special tasks to which they were put.    

            From early in its history, the notion of culture, like the notion of cultivate to which it is closely linked, has had a second meaning which creates a connotes a positive value to “being cultured/civilized.” In England the term was also used to indicate “worshipful homage” among Christians, who, within a few centuries, would seek to “bring culture” to the “uncultivated peoples” of the world.

            When we turn to the term, education, which entered English from Latin at about the same time as “culture,”  we find a similar duality. Resorting to the OED (in deference to this venue)  we find that the primary meaning of  education is  “ The process of nourishing or rearing a child,  a young person, an animal” (OED, 1971, p. 833). The similarity between education, so interpreted, and culture, is obvious. Education also has important alternative meanings, which speak directly to the problem of understanding contemporary relations between culture and education more deeply:

  1. “The systematic instruction, schooling, or training given to the young in preparation for the work of life” (OED, 1971, p. 833) and
  2. 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).

As you can readily see, both culture and education refer simultaneously to process and product. They overlap in their emphasis upon sustaining the life of the community by bringing about change in young organisms. They overlap, too, in their ambivalence about how this is to be done, through training, pruning, and shaping, or through induction of latent potential. Consequently, they overlap on the uncertainties surrounding what sorts of tools to use, including what sorts of institutionalized practices are most appropriate to the task.

 

Cross-cultural and historical

            Equally vexing is the question of how we should view comparison across cultures and historical time. In the 19th century, this was not really an issue. It was widely assumed by the earliest anthropologists that the study of the people to be found in Africa, the Americas, and many other parts of the world, that cross-cultural comparisons were simultaneously cross-historical.

E.B. Tylor, one of the founders of modern anthropology,  captures the spirit of such thinking in his hyperbolic characterization of Civilization.

We may fancy ourselves looking on Civilization as in personal figure she traverses the world; we see her lingering or resting by the way, and often deviating into paths that bring her toiling back to where she had passed long ago; but direct or devious, her  path lies forward, and if now and then she tries a few  backward steps, her walk soon falls into a helpless stumbling. It is not according to her nature, her feet were not made to plant uncertain steps behind her, for both in her forward view and her onward gain she is of truly human type. (Tylor 1874), p. 69)               

Enthusiasm for the equation of social evolution and progress has subsided considerably in the century and a half since Tylor wrote.  Contemporary events in the middle-east and the rise of post-modernism coincide in their revulsion for the “master narrative” equating history and progress. James Wertsch  (ref), for example, explicitly rejected the use of the term, “cultural-historical” to characterize his ideas, many inspired by Soviet psychologists, because of the danger that their use of Marxist ideas implied that cross-cultural variations are really cross-historical, with modern technological society as the highest rung (so far) on the ladder of history. Similarly, Robert LeVine and Merry White  explicitly challenge the idea that education for life in a bureaucratized, technologically sophisticated society is in any general sense to be viewed as betterment of the human condition, arguing instead for recognition of cultural pluralism as a precondition to any effort at making general value statements (LeVine and White 1986). Nevertheless, the idea of socio‑cultural evolution remains important in the social sciences whether viewed skeptically or not  (see (Feinman and Manzanilla 2000; Hallpike 1979; Ingold 1986). 

Despite these well recognized difficulties, recent decades have seen an unparalleled amount of scholarly research which seeks to understand the consequences of different educational arrangements in different national/cultural contexts. Having forewarned you that the topic is treacherous,  I will now venture into it, hoping the mental journey may be stimulating, if ultimately inconclusive.

 

History, Social Differentiation, and “Education.”

In a recent monograph entitled “Non-Western Educational Traditions”  (Reagan 2000), p. xiii) Timothy Reagan argues that the term, “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.” While I sympathize with his criticism of thoughtless writers on the topic who assume that societies lacking formal schooling are bastions of ignorance (and there are many such commentators), an unfortunate byproduct of assuming a universal meaning of the concept of education forces Reagan, and many whose work he draws upon, to place the term in quotation marks, or to qualify it with terms such as “informal” or “education in the broadest sense” to indicate that the process of “preparing the next generation” has indeed varied across time and across societies.

Small, face to face societies: “Education=enculturation=participation

(Bruner and et al. 1966), p. 59), in an influential monograph on culture and cognitive development, remark that 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). Elsewhere in the same essay he comments that  the process by which implicit culture is “acquired” by the individual ... is such that awareness and verbal formulation are intrinsically difficult (p. 58).

Similarly, Meyer Fortes, in his well known monograph on education in Taleland emphasizes that “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... (Fortes 1938; Schmandt- Besserat 1975), p. 8).

Echoing these descriptions, Regan reviews ethnographic evidence for 76 societies in sub-Saharan Africa and concludes that in the African setting, education “cannot (and indeed should not) be separated from life itself” (p. 29),

However, even in such small, face to face societies, there are exceptions to these generalizations concerning the total fusion of adult and child social sphere, such as rites de passage, and I am always suspicious of accounts which minimize the heterogeneity within cultural groups (with respect to sex role obligations, for example). But for purpose of argument, lets assume that this picture of undifferentiated social life and education-as-enculturation represents a reasonable approximation to most of life in small, face to face, hunter-gatherer groups or subsistence farming groups.

 

Rudimentary forms of separation between enculturation and education

Even granting such an “Ur” starting point, what one encounters in many small societies where agriculture had displaced hunting and gathering as the mode of life, but which remain small in size and relatively isolated from each other,  is the beginnings of differentiation of child and adult life suggesting early forms of deliberate teaching which may indeed correspond to education, usually involving a good deal of training, but often with some degree of inducing involved as well.

In many societies in rural Africa, for example, what are referred to casually as rites de passage may be institutionalized activities that last for several years and teaching is certainly involved (Reagan, 2000). Among the Kpelle and Vai peoples of Liberia, where I worked in the 1960’s and 1970’s,  for example,  children were separated from their communities for four or five years, in an institution referred to in Liberian pidgen as “bush school.” There children were instructed by selected elders in the essential skills of making a living as well as the foundational ideologies of the society, embodied in ritual and song. Some began there a years-long apprenticeship which would later qualify them to be specialists in bone setting, midwifery, and other valued arcane knowledge.

Shifting to the historical record, it  appears that it is primarily, if not only, when societies grow numerous and elaborate technologies which permit the accumulation of substantial material goods, that the form of enculturation to which we apply the term, schooling, emerges in a form that appears to duplicate itself in many respects wherever it is encountered.

 

Social accumulation, differentiation, and the advent of schooling

As a part of the sea change in human life pattern associated with the bronze age in what is now referred to as the middle east,  the organization of human life began a cascade of changes, which while unevenly distributed in time and space, appear to be widely, if not universally, associated with the advent of formal schooling.  In the Euphrates valley, the smelting of bronze revolutionized economic and social life. With bronze it became possible till the earth in more productive ways, to build canals to control to the flow of water, to equip armies with more effective weapons, and so on.  Under these conditions, one part of the population could grow enough food to support large number besides themselves. This combination of factors made possible a substantial division of labor and development of the first city states  (Schmandt- Besserat 1975).

Another essential technology which enabled this new mode of life was the elaboration of a previously existing, but highly restricted mode of representing objects by inscriptions on tokens and the elaboration of the first writing system, cuneiform, which evolved slowly over time. Initially the system was used almost exclusively for record keeping, but evolved to represent not only objects but the sounds of language enabling letter writing and the recording a religious texts (Larsen 1986); Schmandt-Besserat 1996) The new system of cuneiform writing could only be mastered after long and systematic study, but so essential was such record keeping to the coordination of activities in relatively large and complex societies, where crop sizes, taxes, troop provisioning, and modes exchange without which they could not exist, that these societies began to devote resources to support selected young men with the explicit purpose of making them scribes, people who could write. The places where young men were brought together for this purpose were the earliest formal schools.

 Figure 1: Earliest Known Example of a Summeriian School

Not only the activities that took place in these schools, but the architecture and organization of discourse within them were in many respects startlingly modern. As shown in Figure 1, the classroom consisted of rows of desks, facing forward to a single location where a teacher stood, guiding them in repetitive practice of the means of writing and the operations which accompanied it.  Note that instead of inkwells, the classroom contains bowls where wet clay could be obtained to refresh current tablets. In many such schools, the compiling of quantified lists of valued items was a major past time, although some letter writing also occurred. These lists were often viewed as evidence of extraordinary cognitive achievements. Table 1 compares an ancient list with one current in American schools

Insert Table 1 about here

Significantly,  evidence concerning early schooling indicates that more than socially neutral, technical literacy and numeracy skills were thought to be acquired there. Such lists and the means for creating them were embued with special powers such as are currently ascribed to those who are “civilized” and it was clearly recognized that socio-economic value flowed from this knowledge. As one father admonished his son, several thousand years ago:

I have seen how the belaboured man is belaboured – thou should set they hear in pursuit of writing ... Behod 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 crocadiles; he stank more than rish-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)

 

Although the details differ, a similar story could be told for China, where bureaucratized schooling arose a thousand or so years later, and in Egypt, as well as in many of the Civilizations that followed. In the middle ages, the focus of elementary schooling shifted to what LeVine and White refer to as “the acquisition of virtue” through familiarity with sacred texts, but a certain number of students were taught essential record keeping skills commensurate with the forms of economic and political activity that needed to be coordinated through written records. 

It is also important to note that many features found in the earliest ancient schools remained in place down to the present day; Schooling, while integral to the functioning of large, enduring, and increasingly technology-dependent  societies, was restricted to relatively privileged parts of the population, and until relatively recently, to the male part of the population. It is only in the last 3 decades or so that this situation has materially changed, with consequences we shall examine shortly.

As characterized by LeVine and White (1986) the shift from schools in large agrarian societies to contemporary societies (whether industrialized, or agrarian, former colonies of European industrial powers) share the following set of common features:

1.      The school has been internally organized to include age grading, permanent buidlings 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.

Surveying the current situation, it is estimated that perhaps 50% of the world’s children attend school for some number of years, although the level of schooling attained by many may amount to no more than 1-2 years attendance at a school where many  pupils do not understand the language being spoken while many others receive no more than an elementary school education which provides them with the rudiments of the basic skills for which schools are presumably intended.

 Overwhelmingly, the model of schooling adopted currently around the world is based upon European models that evolved in the 19th century and which followed conquering European armies into other parts of the world (LeVine and White 1986; Levine, Levine et al. 2001), for a more extensive treatment of this evolution over a longer period of time).

However, locally traditional forms of enculturation, even of schooling, have by no means been obliterated, sometimes, preceding (Wagner 1993), sometimes co-existing with (Levine and White, 1986), the more or less universal “culture of formal schooling” supported by, and support of,  the nation state. Often these more traditional forms assert local religious and ethical values. Nonetheless, these alternatives still retain many of the structural features already evident in the large agrarian societies of the  Middle Ages.

Insert Picures of Quaranic schooling in the bush, Juku,

As a consequence of these historical trends, which are still contested (as the current rise of religious fundamentalism and nationalism that threaten the lives of people all over the globe clearly attests)  an institutional form,  somewhat crudely identifiable as “Western-style” education, is an ideal if not a reality.  It operates in the service of state building, economic development,  the bureaucratic structures through which rationalization of this process is attempted, and exists as a pervasive fact of contemporary life. According to a survey conducted by UNESCO in 1998,  by 1990 more than 80% of children in Latin America,  Asia (outside of Japan) and Africa were enrolled in public school, although there are large disparities among regions and many children only complete a few years of schooling. Nonetheless, experience of what, for a better word, I will call “Western-style” schooling has become a pervasive fact of life the world over.

With this set of considerations as background, albeit presented in somewhat vulgarized fashion, I now turn to the question of the consequences of this pervasive form of educational experience for the development of individual children, their communities,  and humanity more generally, in the contemporary world. I will pay special attention to the role of culture and cultural variations in shaping any such consequences.

 

The consequences of education in post-colonial societies.

            Although there were some attempts to assess the cognitive and social  impacts of formal schooling compared to indigenous forms of education prior to World War II, by and large the beneficial effects of formal schooling were assumed to be self evident to European and American policy makers. During the 19th century teachers, often missionaries, followed European troops to help carry the “white man’s burden.”  Asia, South America, and Africa all experienced this form of cultural penetration. One participant in such work referred to women sent to the Philippines in 1901 as “a “second wave of troops,” remarking that the school in which she taught was no different in content from what was concurrently occurring in schools across the United States (Cleaves 1994; quoted in Rogoff 2002).

            A small sample of statements by the founders of UNESCO, a secular organization,  reveals clearly the way in which they viewed their mission:

...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)

In the spirit of UNESCO's view, economist Daniel Lerner argued that a key attribute of modern thinking is the ability to take another person's perspective and to empathize with their point of view  (Lerner 1958). Lerner was quite specific about the relationship between psychological modernity and modern economic activity. The ability to take another's point of view, he wrote,

is an indispensable skill for moving people out 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).

The inability to adopt another’s point of view is, of course,  the central characteristic attributed to the thinking of 3-6 year old children by Jean Piaget.  Some did not shrink from drawing the obvious conclusion.  In 1979, C. P. Hallpike summarized decades of psychological research comparing the intellectual performance of  educated and non-educated people of various ages on Piagetian and other a wide variety of cognitive tasks. With very few exceptions, the schooled participants outperformed those who had not attended school. These differences between schooled and non-schooled children led him to conclude that most of the time, “primitives” do indeed think like small children.

Two examples describing  the kind of performance changes that appear to be associated with schooling illustrate the basis for such broad reaching conclusions.,

 Donald Sharp and his co‑workers studied the potential impact of schooling on the way Mayan Indians on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico organized their mental lexicons (Sharp and et al. 1979). When adolescents who had attended high school one or more years were asked which words they associated with the word “duck,” they responded with other words in the same biological category, such as “fowl,” “goose,” “chicken,” and “turkey.” But when adolescents in the same area who had not attended school were presented with the same word, their responses were dominated by words that describe what ducks do (“swim,” “fly”) or what people do with ducks (“eat”). Such word associations are often used as a subscale on IQ tests where duck-goose is accorded a higher score than duck-fly. In addition, a good deal of developmental research shows that in the course of development, young children are more likely to produced duck-fly than duck-goose.  The results of this study and findings from other parts of the world (such as (Cole, Gay et al. 1971)) suggest that schooling sensitizes children to the abstract, categorical meanings of words, in addition to building up their general knowledge. A study by Daniel Wagner suggests that children who attend school gain memory‑enhancing skills (Wagner 1974). Wagner also conducted his study among educated and uneducated Maya  in Yucatan. He asked a large number of people varying in age from 6 years to adulthood to recall the positions of picture cards laid out in a linear array (see Figure  2). The items pictured on the cards were taken from a poular local version of bingo called lotería, which uses pictures instead of numbers, so Wagner could be certain that all the pictures were familiar to all of his subject. On repeated occasions,  each of seven cards was displayed for two seconds and then turned face down. As soon as all seven cards had been presented, a duplicate of a picture on one of the cards was shown and people had to point to the position where they thought its twin was located. By selecting different duplicate pictures, Wagner in effect manipulated the length of time between the first presentation of a picture and the moment it was to be recalled.

Earlier research in the United States had demonstrated a marked increase in children’s ability to remember the locations of cards after they reached middle childhood (Hagen, Meacham et al. 1970). Wagner found that the performance of children who were attending school improved with age, just as in the earlier study by Hagen and his colleagues (see Figure 3). However, older children and adults who did not attend school remembered no better than young children, leading Wagner to conclude that it

was schooling that made the difference. Additional analyses of the data revealed that those who attended school systematically rehearsed the items as they were presented. leading to the improvement in their performance.

These finding make it appear that schooling helps children to develop a new, more sophisticated, repertoire of cognitive abilities. In the case of word associations, it appears that a more mature, scientifically organized lexicon comes into being. In the study of memory, it appears that schooling promotes specialized strategies for remembering and so enhances children’s ability to commit arbitrary material to memory for purposes of later testing. Had this research been conducted in the United States, older children or adults who responded in the less sophisticated ways would have been suspected to some form of mental retardation.

 But there are serious reasons to doubt that differences obtained with standard psychological testing methods provide any logical evidence at all for generalized changes in classical categories of cognitive functioning. For example, it is not plausible to believe that word meaning fails to develop in among children who have not attended school. The nonliterate Mayan farmers studied by Sharp and his colleagues knew perfectly well that ducks are a kind of fowl. Although they did not refer to this fact in the artificial circumstances of the free‑association task, they readily displayed awareness of it when they talked about the kinds of animals their families kept and the prices brought different categories at the market.

 Another set of facts that gave us pause come from studies in which task procedures are modified in ways that accord more with local knowledge or are less school like in the way they are presented. In dozens of such cases, differences between schooled and non-schooled populations disappear. This is true, for example, in studies of memory . When the materials to be remembered are part of a meaningful setting, such as a folk story or when objects are placed in a diorama of the subjects’ town, the effects of schooling on memory performance disappear (Rogoff and Waddell 1882; Mandler, Scribner et al. 1980). Similarly, when young children’s knowledge of the words used in free association experiments is rich, they provide categorical, not functional free associations (LCHC, 1979).  These demonstrations have led some to conclude that in a very fundamental sense, using school like tasks to make school/non-school comparisons violates the logic of proper experimental  design which demands, at a minimum, that the stimulus conditions be equivalent among groups. But others have rejected this argument, suggesting that these procedural changes merely simplify the task, masking the real changes wrought by schooling (Toomela, 2000). So the issue appears to remain undecided on procedural grounds.

But as evidence mounted for the positive cognitive consequences of schooling, we became increasingly aware that the entire structure of our investigatory procedures served as covert models of schooling practices. We noted that virtually all of our experimental tasks bear a strong resemblance to the tasks children encounter in school, but bear little or no relation to the structure of the intellectual demands they face outside of school.  Piagetian water conservation tasks,  word associations, and remembering arbitrary arrays of objects are reasonable cases in point. When, except in school or on a quiz show, does one encounter such a task?

The logic of this sort of comparative work appeared to demand that we find tasks that schooled and unschooled children from the same town encounter with equal frequency, and then demonstrate that children who go to school solve the problem in more sophisticated ways tied to their schooling. In effect we were treating psychological tasks as neutral with respect to their contexts of use, when this was patently false.

Overall, I think it is fair to say that no general intellectual superiority of schooled children has been found in several decades of research on this issue. But this does not mean that schooling exerts no noticeable impact on children. First, as many have noted, schools are places where children’s activity is mediated through print, and it seems certain that practice in representing language using writing symbols improves children and adults’ ability to analyse the sound structure of their language, a finding which Peter Bryant and his colleagues have made good use of in the design of programs for the teaching of reading (ref). Nor does such meta-linguistic awareness require schooling. Vai farmers from north-western Liberia showed similar increased language analysing abilities even though they had acquired literacy apart from schooling (Scribner and Cole 1981). But these effects, while not trivial, do not indicate that education produces any general influence on children that can be considered superior to the kind of enculturation that has existed in all societies throughout human history.

This realization led us on a multi-year investigation of the methodological foundations of experimental approaches to cognitive development: when and how might it be possible, we asked, to identify cognitive tasks that occur in everyday lives of villager and townspeople in countries where modern schooling is unevenly distributed so that we could assess how schooled and non-schooled people tackled tasks of equivalent signifance and familiarty? That it inculcates specific skills which may well be of economic and social value is not in dispute, although the proportion of children who achieve such valued skills while still in school is only a fraction of those who enter the institution of schooling initially.

In the intervening years, a great deal of work has been done to provide more plausible measures of the outcome of schooling. A number of investigators for example, studied how children and adults who attended school or engaged in some other activity using mathematically equivalent tasks (such as selling candy on the street, or measuring cloth, or calculating the area of a building site) made  various calculations ((Nunes, Schliemann et al. 1993); (Saxe 1984). What this research has repeatedly discovered is that groups differing in their amount of school-based experience or everyday, work-related experience, approached the same task (logically speaking) in very different ways.  The schooled subject’s reliance on written algorithms often led them to make egregious errors, while the mathematical activities arising in the course of candy selling or calculating the ratio of one board length to another was both quantitatively superior and free of nonsensical answers. Moreover, in a number of cases, the procedures acquired informally in the course of work were more adequately generalized, undermining the oft-repeated idea that such knowledge was somehow bound to particular contexts of use. Over and over again, it has turned out that it is knowledge acquired in school that is most vulnerable to becoming encapsulated. These results are worth further consideration because they obtain only at relatively rudimentary levels of mathematics and it is unlikely that  the calculus or string theory would arise without special institutions for the teaching of mathematics precisely as an abstract form of knowledge. But I wish instead to turn my attention in a different direction, and to answer the rhetorical question, “where could cognitive skills and modes of discourse such as those learned in elementary school find application outside of school of equal relevance to schooled and non-schooled populations?

Actually we provided an answer to this question in our monograph on the consequences of education in the Yucatan:

... the information-processing skills which school attendance seems to foster could be useful in a variety of tasks demanded by modern states, including clearical 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).

While we did not follow up on the implications of this conclusion,  Robert LeVine and his colleagues did,  in a program of research that provides what I believe to be the most convincing evidence of the cognitive and social consequences of schooling, and one that has extremely important policy implications as well.

These data focus on the ways in which formal schooling changes the behavior of mothers toward their offspring and the subsequent improvements of their children not only on a wide variety of cognitive tasks but in school achievement itself (LeVine and White 1986; Levine, Levine et al. 2001). Le Vine and his colleagues start from two major changes in maternal behavior that have been widely documented by demographers over the last several decades: the children of women who have attended elementary school experience a lower level of infant mortality, better health, and greater academic achievement. These researchers propose a set of plausible habits, preferences, and skills that children acquire in school which they retain into adulthood and apply in the course of raising their own children. This set includes, in addition to rudimentary literacy and numeracy skills

1.      Discourse skills involved using written texts for purposes of understanding and using oral communication that is directly relevant to the negotiation of interactions in health and educational settings involving their children.

2.      Models of teaching and learning based on the scripted activities and authority structures of schooling, such when in subordinate positions schooled women adopt and employ behaviors appropriate to the student role and when in superordinate positions, adopt behaviors appropriate to the teacher role.

3.      An ability and willingness to acquire and accept information from the mass media, such as following health prescriptions more obediently.

Insert Table 2 about here

 

LeVine, his colleagues and others have carried out an impressive set of studies sampling many parts of the world, on the basis of which they offer the following general model of how school-based learning, although it does not produced generalized socio-cognitive change at the time, does produce context-specific changes in behavior that have quite general consequences with respect to the task of child rearing which in turn produces general consequences in the next generation

Table 2. Levine et al.’s model for the pathways by which maternal education can bring about changes in skills and attitudes which produce generalized changes in the social and cognitive behavior of their children (LeVine, LeVine et al., 2001, p. 26)

 

A great deal more research needs to be done to clarify important causal relations hidden in the diagram in Table 2. For example, how much education of what kind produces what levels of behavioral change an how serious might selection factors be in the reported results. But at least as important are questions about what has been lost in addition to the obvious benefits of reduced infant mortality the ability to perform better in schools. As LeVine and White (1986),  modern schooling as part of the rationalization of technologically advanced nation states is not an unproblematic moral good. At present it rests upon forms of age-grading that alienate generations from each other and put individuals within generations into competition with each other in ways that are also alienating. It is also part of a world wide acceleration of the decimation of the earth as a common ecology for human life which may push human kind inescapably down the path to total extinction.

 

Cultural Variations and School Achievement In Technologically Advanced Nation States

            Among the major modern nation states, with well developed stare institutions and a heavy reliance on modern technologies as an essential component of economic activity, there are two kinds of concerns about the intersection of schooling and culture. The first concerns cross-nataional comparisons. There are marked discrepancies in achievement levels when schools adopt essentially the same curricula designed to inclucate the same skills.  The second concerns cultural variations within modern nation states among different ethnic groups,  a problem long of concern in the United States, but one which has become of increasing concern in many countries owing to the de facto existence of, and in at least some cases the urgent economic need for,

immigration. I will treat the two cases separately because they raise somewhat different issues.

 

 

            Cross-National Comparisons

            Interest in cross-national comparisons became a matter of intense debate in the 1980’s largely as a result of Japan’s economic achievements which evoked deep concern in the United States indexed by a report from the National Research Council entitled “A Nation at Risk.” The impetus of this concern resulted in a massive, and repeated, set of cross-national studies, the most systematic of which focuses mathematics and science at various grade levels (TIMSS, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study). The basic results of this study for 8th Grade mathematics are presented in amusing form in the following figures, taken from the website of the research group at UCLA led by James Stigler.

Insert Figures from UCLA TIMSS site

 

These quantitative data have been supplemented by ethnographic classroom studies in some of the countries involved (most notably  Japan, Germany, and the U.S.A. for which a videotaped summary of findings is also available.

            While the quantitative differences are clear enough, the reasons for them, and particularly those reasons that can right be termed “cultural” are more difficult  to summarize. First, there is the problem of where to look. Most of the looking relevant to characterizing cultural factors associated with performance has been done in the classroom. James Stigler and  James Hiebert, who conducted ethnographic research in conjunction with the 1997 TIMSS study contrast Japanese, German, and U.S. classrooms in this way:

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 so that students are likely to use procedures from prior lessons as a starting point.

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. One observer commented wryly that in the U.S. classrooms  “there are the students and there is the teacher. But I have trouble finding the mathematics (Stigler and Hiebert 1999), p.25-25).

 

When we look for cultural factors which might underpin these classroom differences, there are many hints that they are present, but their presence quickly leads to new questions. For example, when one American teacher viewed the tapes, he sought to implement the Japanese problem-solving approach in his classroom, but he failed. The students, gathered in small groups, waited to be told what procedures to use. Alternatively, when observers in an early study in this series score the percentage of time during teacher-led sessions when the students were paying attention, they found that only 45% of the American children were attending to the teacher in comparison with almost 70% of the Japanese children, a difference found at both the 1st and 5th grades (Stevenson, Stigler et al. 1986; Stigler and Hiebert 1999).

There are also a variety of features that can loosely  be referred to as “social cultural” which contribute to national difference that are relatively easily to quantify. Amount of time spent in the classroom doing mathematics is one obvious factor as is level of teacher preparation. Outside the classroom the educational level of parents, amount of time spent doing homework, and respect accorded the teaching profession are additional candidates. All these factors speak to the value of mathematics and science education within the society as a whole.

Perhaps the most difficult to specify and link quantitatively to performance differences are factors that are most clearly cultural, a topic about which so much has been written that I can only highlight a few key points. For example,  early childhood enculturation in Japan presupposes a different notion of personhood in which emphasizes interdependence, mutuality of trust, and the high value accorded to self-discipline and perfectionism in fulfilling one’s role (Befu 1986) These features combine with a strong belief in effort rather than innate ability, as the cause of success. The combination is a potent one when it is achieved in the school. It is no wonder, for example, that while “not in assigned seat” is a relevant variable in coding behavior of American children, it is occurs to rarely to be useful in Japan.

Americans and others who admire Japanese classroom achievements have sometimes sought to encourage adoption of Japanese teaching methods as a means of overcoming achievement gaps. It now appears to be recognized that in so far as such efforts  are focused on the classroom behaviors of teachers and children they are very unlikely to succeed. The story of the American teacher who attempted to change an eighth  grade classroom point squarely at the problem: classroom interactions are embedded in, and rest upon, an enormous amount of cultural conditioning. Schooling is only one institution in a vastly complex of culturally organized institutional arrangements. Changing only one part of the system without changing other parts is at best a risky enterprise.

Moreover, as in the case of the introduction of modern schooling into agrarian low technology societies, one has to consider the costs as well as the benefits. As Harami Befu (1986) points out, the school system which many Americans so admire violence and bullying in middle school, abuse of parents, glue sniffing and outright refusal to leave home for school. The same point applies to all efforts to understand the consequences of schooling in its national socio- cultural context.

Within-national cultural variations

Perhaps the most difficult and contentious current issues revolving around the issue of cultural variations and education are taking place in the advanced industrial nations of Europe and North America (Gallego and Cole, 2002). The issue of immigration, diversity, and citizenship is unavoidable in any country in Northern Europe or North America. When a previously homogenous country such as  Finland is told that it must encourage immigration for its own economic survival, one knows that the problem of cultural differences in education and its consequences are serious indeed.

In some respects the question of within-country variation in culture and education is the historical consequence of the very factors that produced the spread of European-style education in the first place.  Having promoted universal education as the engine of modernization and relinquishing direct political control, we are finding that the formerly colonial peoples “over there”  have agreed to the superiority of our way of life, in particular, its material aspects, and now have made their appearance “over here.”

The reactions and counter-reactions this situation has caused permeate all aspects of society. (I confine my comments here to the American situation which I know best and leave it to my audience from other countries to make appropriate generalizations to their local circumstances).Roughly speaking there are four approaches to dealing with the problem of cultural diversity and schooling, the first of which was outlawed in the United States in the middle of the last century, but is returning in various guises.

1.      The first alternative was the doctrine of separate but equal, in which non-Anglo children were segregated into their own schools and given an educational modeled on the general European model.  The fact that teachers were poorly paid and trained, the facilities were generally abysmal, and the families required the children’s families’ needed their labor for significant  periods meant that such education, however separate, was never equal. And the possibility of appropriating indigenous forms was never seriously considered. Efforts at desegregating US schools have generally failed, and in response, some non-Anglo groups have opted to form schools of their own, in some cases, such as Black Muslim schools, introducing their own forms of pedagogy and social organization.

2.      A reasonably sizeable literature has grown up which seeks to modify standard curricula in a way that builds upon indigenous enculturation practices either as a supplement to standard schooling or as a “bridge” to standard schooling. A large, early, and apparently successful effort of this sort was conducted in Hawaii where indigenous modes of talk and interaction were blended into school lessons. Another effort has included starting high school literature classes using literature containing speech genres known and appreciated by the student body and then, once analytic grasp of these strategies has been mastered, showing students how the same techniques could be used for analyzing Euro-American literature (Lee 1998).

3.      A third approach has been to legitimate knowledge that non-EuroAmerican children come to school with by directly tapping into their local funds of knowledge  both by having teachers spend time in their local communities and by inviting local community adults with special expertise into the school (Gonzalez, Andrade et al. 2001).

4.      The fourth approach, which reigns at present in my home state of California, is to mandate total immersion of immigrant children in Euro- American educational and cultural forms, outlawing the use of home languages in the school and treating home culture as a problem to be eradicated.

As you can imagine, each of these approaches meets with various kinds of objections and there is a great deal of confusion about what part of disparities in educational outcome associated with cultural difference really emanate from this cause.

One set of objections comes from those who do not want to be assimilated into main-stream U.S. society,  although they want the technical knowledge to be able to earn a good living. This sort of objection comes in many forms. In some cases, it carries with it the accusation that teachers are required, like it or not, to disseminate the dominant cultural forms in such a manner that children will never be able to master them, thus covertly maintaining the unequal status quo. In other cases it comes from those who argue that is it not culture which accounts for performance disparities at all, but  gross inequalities in resource allocations, which are truly staggering. In the San Diego area, for example, 80% of the variation in children’s academic achievement can be accounted for by a combination of the socio-economic status of the parents, transience of students,  the proportion of teachers in the school with credentials to teach their subject matter and ?

 

 

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Table 1



 

                       ALGEBRA PERFORMANCE

 

 

 

 

 

GEOMETRY PERFORMANCE

 

 

 

DATA ANALYISIS PERFORMANCE

 

OVERALL COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE