Thanks for the leads and suggestions in this quest .... I hope it will be a
less simplistic intellectual exercise than some I've noticed lately ....
Meanwhile, I think the key issues do turn around the "division of labour"
in relation to schooling ... but a lot needs to be unpacked in this. We
need to understand how to separate the institutions of schooling from the
functions of schooling. A given institution, monastery or modern school,
has multiple functions, only some of which belong to the lineage I am
interested in. A given function can be realized in a society through
multiple institutions.
Enculturation is pervasive, in some sense ALL institutions contribute to
enculturation -- which is one reason why I don't take seriously
conservatives who are always warning of the end of civilization as they
wish to know it, if we don't keep schools, curricula, etc. just as they
are. Cultures are very resilient at reproducing themselves. All we can do
is marginally increase or decrease their average rates of change (and
remember that the averages combine long periods of not much change with
shorter periods of perhaps very rapid change ... however we measure the
degree of change in something as complex as a culture, or even the
practices of schooling). So the interesting function of schooling must be
more specific than enculturation. One proposal, surely too simple, but
usefully suggestive, is that schooling specifically enculturates us into
certain kinds of social practices like basic literacy ... but what kinds
are these?
I am not in favor of a return to apprenticeship, but I am in favor of less
radical isolation of school learning from learning in non-school contexts
and communities. I don't think apprenticeship is as general a mode of
enculturation as is sometimes imagined. There are many kinds of knowledge
which form the basis of specialized and technical practices in a modern
society that cannot be learned by "legitimate peripheral participation" if
only for the reason that they are not displayed or discussed during the
performance of the practices that depend on them ... in Latour's terms, the
chains of transformations and dependencies of one practice on another have
grown so long that much of what you need to know is "black-boxed" in actual
daily practice (say in a research laboratory). People do things, but to
understand why they are doing something now, or to understand what what
they're doing means, to be able to act as they would act in similar
circumstances, it is not enough to learn to do as they do, you have to
learn the underlying "theory" or meaning structure. In many modern
institutions we assume that everyone legitimately present is already
educated in all this and we leave it unsaid. Indeed we have to leave it
unsaid or we could not build on it as high and far as we do.
So practices "like literacy" are a candidate indicator for the specialized
and critical enculturation function of schooling, and so are practices
"like knowing scientific theories". But the arguments in these cases are
different... or are they?
Schools in our society are social-sorting machines, and they are
worker-producing machines, and they are economic centers for local
communities (the politics of school boards, esp. in larger districts, is
about controlling the non-instructional budget and contracts ...), but that
is beside the point here ... those functions don't have to go together ...
they obscure the lineage I am interested in: the lineage that goes back to
what schooling teaches that is not well taught in apprenticeship or by
observation or by legitimate peripheral participation.
Yes, early Sumerian schools also had economies of scale ... but is that an
essential or accidental feature? the need for them was produced by a
scaling-up of the social-organizational scale of the whole society ... but
what functions did they serve even before that? Were they at this earlier
stage not schooled
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
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