Harry Potter’s world (part 1)

Appelbaum, Peter.  (2008).  Children’s Books for Grown-Up Teachers:  Reading and Writing Curriculum Theory.  New York, NY:  Routledge.

6.  Harry Potter’s World (part 1)

The second to the last Harry Potter movie came out about a month ago.  This series is still so popular that the final book had to be split into two movie parts.  Of course, this is probably simply a way to make more money from Harry Potter fans, but having re-read the final volume while viewing the new trailer repeatedly, ending this story is complicated; perhaps worthy of two movies!  The characters are almost “grown” now, and Voldemort has gathered his minions again.  The Ministry of Magic has fallen.  Darkness reigns.

In some ways a return to darkness describes 2010, the year of the dead queer (Lugg, 2010), the year of the tea party (Rayfield, 2010)—back to the 1950’s (or the 1700’s depending on your interpretation; Bell, 1989).  I situate myself as a radical social reconstructionist (Stone, 2003, p. 108), and all I see around me are essentialist ideas being promoted in education.  Where could Harry Potter possibly fit into this essentialist school culture?  “What is it about our culture that embraces the Harry Potter books and has turned Harry Potter into such a phenomenon?” (Appelbaum, 2008, p. 95).  Appelbaum debunks three “presumptions”:

Can we say that consumer culture has trumped all other possible manifestations of liberal democracy? … Do we want to say that children are passive, naive recipients of greedy corporate cultural products? … Can we understand the cultural meanings of Harry Potter stories (or any other popular cultural artifact) as a distance observer?  (p. 95-96)

How do readers utilize these stories to make sense of their lives?  Where does school fit into this process?

In both the Harry Potter books and in children’s lives, school functions to accentuate what constitutes technologies, what constitutes magic and wonder, and, finally, through consumer culture, what it means to become a human being.  In this way, I find the books and the culture that embraces them buttress each others’ postmodern efforts to fulfill an outdated enlightenment fantasy of utopia through technology.

The technoculture of consumer culture in and out of school

For children growing up in and with technoculture, concepts of cyborg imagery, biological monsters, fantasy characters, power, knowledge, magic, and prosthetic extensions of self are not categorical. (p. 97)

Children accept new ideas as part of their world more readily than adults.  Magic may be conceived as science, and vice versa.  Science may be perceived as technological, and vice versa.  Technology may be considered magic, and vice versa.  Knowledge and power are bestowed by each but with fewer boundaries or conflicts in the child’s world.

Technocentric utopianism for many children is really more aptly described as melancholic acceptance of responsibility.  (p. 97)

For Harry magic becomes a technology in the war between good and evil, amplifying human powers as a kind of cultural capital.  Similarly, science and technology function in the school curriculum as “techniques of progress” seldom questioned or interrogated (p. 99).

Educator’s responses

Teachers tend to feign disinterest in childhood experiences of cyberculture.  (p. 99)

School knowledge is assumed to be part of “high-status culture” while popular culture and mass media are considered “low-status,” which teachers want to keep out of school.  “When teachers preserve the in-school versus outside-of-school boundaries, they cut themselves off from relationships with children directly connected with the most pressing issues of self, identity, morality, power, and knowledge” (p. 99).

I suggest that our new technoculture requires teaching practices that facilitate an interrogation of this culture, and the facilitation of self-understanding necessary to unravel the intricacies of self-identity in a post-modern world.  The “new curriculum” should consider alternative visions of technology that move it away from the metaphor of prosthesis. … Curriculum, then, must speak fully to issues of identity and questions of what it means to be human in the face of re-engineering and cultural change.  (p. 100)

In the Harry Potter stories the challenges that matter occur outside the classroom.  Everything Harry and his friends learn help them survive greater and greater difficulties in the outside world.  What if this idea were practiced in school buildings today?  What kinds of paradigm shifts would have to happen for that to be the case?  Would schooling continue to be merely a reproduction of the dominant ideology?  Or could schooling take upon itself an innovative role?  How would that innovation affect the curriculum decisions made inside the classroom?

Bell, D.  (1989).  And we are not saved: The elusive quest for racial justice.  Cambridge, MA:  Basic Books.

Lugg, C.  (2010, September 30).  Bullying, harrassing, and beating queers in hope of self-extermination.  Thinking queerly (blog).  Retrieved from http://cath47.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/bullying-harassing-and-beating-queers-in-hopes-of-self-extermination/

Rayfield, J.  (2010, December 20).  Tea Party founder:  Let’s get rid of the ‘socialist’ Methodist church.  TPMMuckraker (online).  Retrieved from http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/tea_party_nation_founder_lets_get_rid_of_the_socia.php

Stone, F. A.  (2003).  Theodore Brameld’s educational reconstruction:  An intellectual biography.  San Francisco, CA:  Caddo Gap Press.

Chapter 5, School as agent of culture II

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Teaching-Learning and the cultural process

“The preceding chapter tried to show that the key to cultural process lies in Tylor’s term ‘acquiring’ — but that metaculturally the term appears to suggest different things to different interpreters.  Thus the realist essentialist way of acquiring is primarily by means of conditioning, while the progressivist way of acquiring is primarily through inquiring.  In different words, the essentialist presupposes a psychology of learning epitomized in some such term as ‘passive mentation,’ while the progressivist takes a more functional and organismic approach through which acquiring as learning involves active and critical transactions with the cultural and physical environment.”  (p. 74)

“. . . we now see that cultural theory and research afford solid ground upon which to approach these problems with an innovating attitude.  Indeed, the contention of some essentialist educators that the school has no legitimate role as an agent of cultural change fails to stand up in the face of such research.  The attitude of innovation, when consciously and deliberately developed by the teacher within a cultural matrix, not only negates this contention, but it influences the learner if only by the contagion of the teacher’s attitude.   Meanwhile, the classroom itself undergoes alteration:  the enculturative process defined merely as passive mentation is superseded by analysis, criticism, originality, and participation, with all the modifications in learning and teaching that these processes imply.”  (p. 79)

“For the essentialist, because truth is already embodied in the nature of the universe and culture, the chief task of the school is to place the learner in a position of receptivity and then to see to it that he acquires as much truth as he possibly can by direct exposure.  For the progressivist, truth is not already present, awaiting disclosure; it is always in the making, always unfinished, always subject to correction as learners engage in further interactions with their natural and human environment.”  (p. 80)

The Control of Education and Cultural Goals

“Cultural goals actually permeate both the curriculum and the learning-teaching process, while cultural order and process are, in turn, inseparable from the problem of educational control.”  (p. 80)

“What, after all, is the purpose of all these rules and regulations?  In short, what is education for?”  (p. 81)

“To write of the need for ‘well-educated men,’ of ‘critical thinking,’ of ‘responsible citizenship,’ and similar goals is motivated by sincere intentions, certainly.  It fails, however, to tell us what we most require; it fails to place these generalities in the setting of real cultures through which alone they become meaningful.  Indeed, what any controller needs most to know is:  Where is our culture going?  And, above all:  Where ought it to go in the future?  Then, and only then, can he begin to answer parallel questions for the great enculturative agency he represents.”  (p. 81)

“From our earlier discussion of cultural goals, we recall two major ways of approaching them — the one, cultural relativism; the other, cultural univeralism.  We saw, too, that anthropologists seem to be moving toward accord that neither of these ways of looking at the goals of culture is sufficient in its use.”  (p. 81)

“From the point of view of educational goals, the bipolar concept of relativism-universalism therefore means that effective cotrol must be guided, on the one hand, by values that are distinctive to the particular community within which the school operates and, on the other hand, by the wider values of region, nation, and even the world.  A high priority task of the educational leader is to search for and develop a balance of both kinds.”  (p. 82)

“Here, indeed, is the reconstructionist type of approach to the whole problem of educational control.  This philosophy, related as it is to the science of anthropology, finds that participation is a cross-cultural value which, while not necessarily universal, appears from the evidence to be very widespread.  Therefore, administrations influenced by this approach are likely to create every conceivable opportunity for parents to engage in planning the work of the school, for involving teachers in problems of curriculum and learning, and for including students (beginning at a very early age) in their own share of cooperative responsibilities.  At the same time, they take into account the cultural habits of the individual community:  thus, a community where a high degree of religious or familial authority has been traditional can hardly be expected to move as rapidly toward a reconstructed pattern of control as one that has not.”  (p. 82)

“[the perennialist philosophy] In common with reconstructionism agrees that much more serious attention should be given the goals of education than is usually given.  But the perennialist has a special attitude, rooted as his thinking is in a special set of ontological and other metacultural assumptions.  The goals of education — and, indeed, of culture — are for him expressions of the much wider teleological direction of reality as a whole, a direction from the ‘potential’ to the ever more ‘actual.’  In a fundamental sense, the business of education is to become as conscious as possible of this unfolding of reality and so to enlist the schools in the everlasting effort to achieve it.  And yet, because the ultimate end of culture (for many perennialists, certainly) is not within culture at all, but in the afterlife of salvation and eternity, we discover this to be the great magnetic goal that finally shapes both the order of the curriculum and the central processes of enculturation.”  (p. 83)

“In terms of education control it follows that, unlike reconstructionist theory, perennialist education encourages a strong policy of authority in the hands of those who, by virtue of their higher actualization in the alleged order of reality, are also closer to the goal of education than any other members of a school system — than teachers, for example.  Therefore, these leaders are the ones who rightly control school policy and practice.”  (p. 83)

Note:  see pp. 84-85 for a clear summary of this chapter.

Chapter 5, School as agent of culture I

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

‘Internalizing’ the Idea of Culture

“To internalize is to fuse the chief characteristics of that idea with one’s own attitudes, feelings, and daily activities.  Culture becomes important to us as persons and as teachers only to the extent that such fusion takes place. . . . To internalize is to move from a merely intellectual formulation, on the one hand, to one’s own personality (one’s own patterns of behavior), on the other hand.”  (p. 66)

“He [Brameld] is, nevertheless, convinced that any student who approaches, say, the idea of culture seriously and responsibly will in the course of time become a very different kind of person and teacher than he would otherwise be. . . . the school too will begin to undergo transformation.  Every school is, in a genuine sense, the creation of those who operate it.  Thus, the kinds of learning and control that occur are, from one point of view, the fruits of whatever orientation toward life and education has developed among the members of a culture directly responsible for the enculturative process.  Teachers, surely, are among the most important of these members.”  (p. 67)

“What difference does an idea such as culture make to our conception of the school curriculum?  What different does it make to the teaching-learning process?  Finally, what difference does it make to the control of education? . . . . The curriculum is thus considered in relation to cultural order, teaching-learning in terms of cultural process, and the control of education in view of cultural goals.”  (p. 67)

Problems of the Curriculum:  the significance of cultural order

“The concept of cultural order, we remember, enables us to view the total environment fashioned by man in terms of spatio-temporal relations — a shorthand term for the fact that every culture may be viewed both in horizontal and vertical perspective, while yet embracing the past, the present, and the future.  This model of cultural order, when it becomes filled with the rich content that such a science as anthropology provides, may now be conceived as a way to organize the curriculum itself.”  (p. 68)

“What could this concept contribute to a distinctive way of unifying and integrating the curriculum of general education?  One answer lies in a controversial contention — namely, that the central obligation of education for most young people should be basically similar, and that the justification for such similarity lies in the struggles and objectives of human beings themselves.  This kind of education should be concerned first of all with the attempt to provide an understanding by the young learner not only of himself but of his relations to others:  other groups, other nations, and equally of theirs to him.”  (p. 68)

“Recall from Chapter 3 that the central core focuses upon problems of intrapersonal and interpersonal relations; that the next wider circle embraces intragroup and intergroup relations (racial, class, and others); and that the widest circle encompasses the relations of whole peoples, nations, and religions.  Thus, through this conception of order, we are able to see the world as a vast intricate network of human relations, from the most intimate to that most inclusive of ‘complex wholes,’ mankind itself.”  (p. 69)

“But, as also has been earlier pointed out, the merely spatial model of culture is defective as long as it lacks the temporal dimension.  We need to think of the curriculum of general education not only in terms of the present relationships of people, but in terms both of their roots in the past and their directions toward the future.  The latter anticipates the problem of cultural goals, to which we return, but the former suggests the need for intensive study of history . . . .”  (p. 70)

“We can better understand the significance of the study of history in a culture-oriented curriculum if we distinguish more clearly between the essentialist approach discussed in the preceding chapter, and the progressivist, also discussed.  It will be remembered that the essentialist, directly or indirectly reflecting as he does the superorganic view of culture, tends metaculturally to regard the order of culture as something ‘out there,’ already determined and structured beyond the control of individual human beings.”  (p. 70)

“Returning now to the study of history in the school, progressivists aware of the metacultural issue are likely to assert that essentialist history is often hypostatized history as well.  Because, moreover, the past is regarded as something that is irrevocably finished, it follows that the kind of history provided by the conventional curriculum is intended primarily to develop in young people an attitude of acceptance toward the out-thereness and completeness of historical events.  Culturally, such an attitude is likely to encourage a conservative frame of mind toward the social heritage.  Hence it is no accident that the essentialist school is usually regarded as an enculturative agent of reinforcement of patterns of culture that have come down to us in the course of time.”  (p. 71)

“History, understood now as the temporal phase of cultural order, may also be interpreted as an operational discipline — that is, the past is approached not as a forever-finished record of objective events but as a boundlessly fertile opportunity to interpret and reinterpret the course of human evolution.”  (p. 72)

“How, then, would a progressivist include history in general education?  If he is consistently operational, he will not, first of all, segregate history from other dimensions of learning experience anywhere nearly as much as do essentialists.  Rather, he will regard it as a vast, fruitful resource to be drawn upon in attacking every conceivable kind of problem — including problems only indirectly related to human experience, such as those of the physical sciences.  Accordingly, history teachers, in the kind of integrated curriculum suggested by cultural order, become resource persons who constantly and cooperatively work with other teachers.”  (p. 72)

Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives III

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Goal-seeking in culture

“If it is true, as earlier contended, that all cultures have implicit or explicit goals — that is, purposes toward which they endeavor to move with some sense of direction — then it is also true that all cultures have more or less articulate sets of values that symbolize rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness.  But the nature of cultural goals, like that of order and process, may be interpreted again in conflicting ways, depending upon the metacultural assumptions from which it is approached.”  (p. 58)

“Let us consider … the view that the values of culture are primarily determined by the basic interest of human beings — by their striving for satisfaction of needs and wants. . . . These range all the way from the physiological hunger of food and sex to the more subtle but nevertheless equally genuine sociopsychological wants of recognition and cooperation.”  (p. 59)

“Such an approach to cultural goals may be expressed axiologically as a functional theory of ethics — ethics being defined here as the philosophic study of moral conduct. . . . the interests of human beings everywhere in the world can be found to have many common denominators, no matter how diversified cultures might otherwise be.  Thus, one of the typical contentions of this approach is that we need to study the values of people cross-culturally — that is, to compare one culture with another to see how far their goals function in both similar and different ways.”  (p. 59)

“Another approach to the problems of goals … is the theory that cultures are moving progressively toward an ultimate end that is somehow inherent in the order and process of culture.  According to this theory, goals are the driving force of all cultural change in that they provide the ‘magnets’ that draw men onward and, in a sense, upward toward perfection.”  (p. 60)

“In ontological terms, the view that culture … is moving inevitably toward an ultimate goal is called teleology.  The nature of the goal may vary according to different theorists, however.  Marxists, for example, hold that it is the ‘classless society’ — the Communist ideal of pure economic freedom through public ownership and control of all means of production.  Those of Father Teilhard’s [de Chardin] faith conceive that the ultimate goal is eternal salvation, and that all cultural processes are in one way or another a means to this perfect and final end.”  (p. 60)

“. . . one may hold that the first view of the goal problem — exemplified by Malinowski — is perhaps closer to what we have called the reconstructionist orientation than to the others.  Reconstructionists hold that the delineation of human goals is to be achieved through cross-cultural research that enlists not only anthropology but all the sciences of human behavior, such as psychiatry and political science.”  (p. 60)

“The reconstructionist educator also takes the position that not only is it possible to describe the desires of human beings by such research, but that it is possible to arrive at much greater consensus than we have thus far achieved as to the desirability of the most important cross-cultural goals.  In other words, description could lead to both prescription and proscription of goals — both to those that are recommended as culturally desirable and to those that are condemned as culturally undesirable.”  (p. 60)

“The bridging of the gap between described values … and prescribed — that is, normative — values, … is suggested by the reconstructionist theory of ‘social consensus.’ . . . It is necessary first to consider the maximum evidence available as to whether certain goals … are in fact accepted by all or most cultures. . . . . The second step requires communication both among members of one culture and also among cultures that the evidence is what it claims to be.  The third step is the endeavor to express as wide agreement as possible upon the basis of the evidence communicated.  The fourth step is to act in order to test out the agreement by observation and experience — thereby determining whether verbalized testimony harmonizes with behavioral testimony.”  (p. 61)

“Referring back for a moment to the knowledge-getting process, one might say that social consensus involves both inquiring and acquiring.  That is, it involves the kind of social inquiring necessary in collecting and comparing evidence and in reaching maximum communication about that evidence.  It involves social acquiring in the sense that the aim of the collecting and communicating of evidence is to achieve as much active agreement as possible about desirable goals on the basis of the evidence and the communication.”  (p. 61)

The major process of culture, acquiring, is thereby linked with cultural goals and the seeking of them — a good indication of why it is impossible in the experience of living cultures to separate any one of the three dimensions (order, process, or goals) from the other two.  It indicates, also, why reconstructionist education, though concerned with achieving desirable goals by practice with social consensus at every possible stage of enculturation, recognizes that cultural goals in turn demand both effective processes of achieving them and effective order of human relationship within which these processes may function.  (p. 61)

“By contrast, the perennialist theory of cultural goals does not assume that one achieves them primarily by a social or public process of acquiring and inquiring, but rather that the goals of man, already inherent as they are in the nature of culture and universe, will be attained if you and I can somehow learn to recognize the absolute laws of reality, knowledge, and value necessary to their attainment and can then abide by these laws to the utmost.”  (p. 62)

In this recognition of objective law, the perennialist reminds one of the essentialist’s attitude toward superorganic order, but he differs from the latter in his insistence that the value-seeking and value-achieving process requires, no less than knowledge-getting, a strong ingredient of intuition and even of revelation.  (p. 62)

“The ultimate goals of culture are not delineated by a cooperative process of gathering, communicating, and agreeing upon relevant evidence; they are discerned, finally, by one’s inherent capacity to discover their character through one’s own rational and spiritual power — reinforced, of course, by divine power.  Education’s most important responsibility is to share in and enhance this discovery.”  (p. 62)

Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives II

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Knowledge in the process of culture

“How do we acquire culture?  Clearly, the central answer is:  through learning.  Here, then, is enough reason for relating that branch of philosophy called ‘epistemology’ to the acquiring process.  If we acquire through learning, are we not then involved in knowledge-getting or, still more simply, knowing?  And when we are knowing, are we not inescapably engaged in truth-seeking as well?” (p. 54)

“Thus, epistemology, as the philosophic study of the criteria of knowledge, appears in the perspective of culture as a quite different discipline than it does at the hands of formal philosophers.  Epistemology is the handmaiden of cultural acquiring, just as ontology, the philosophic study of reality, is the handmaiden of cultural order.”  (p. 54)

“But how can we know reliably or truly?  This question can be effectively answered only when it is determined how learning takes place in culture.  Here, we return to metacultural assumptions.  Just a little investigation reveals that the scientists of culture no more proceed from the same metacultural assumptions when they try to resolve issues of learning and knowledge than they do in the case of cultural reality.”  (p. 54)

“…quite a number of anthropologists regard the learning process as chiefly one of conditioning.  Any student of psychology at once recognizes here the general and loosely bounded position known as behaviorism — namely, the position that human beings, like all animals, learn by responding to the stimuli of an outside environment.”  (p. 55)

“Psychoanalysis focuses upon another and very important way in which conditioning occurs — that is, through largely unconscious influences induced especially by parents in the first years of life, but also continuously by other members of the culture and subculture to which every human being belongs.  Learning, according to this theory, is primarily a process of personality formation by way of emotional responses to the stimuli of those individuals and groups closest to the child.”  (p. 55)

“The connection of learning as conditioning to the superorganic theory of cultural order should at once become apparent.  Realists, particularly, tend to support a stimulus-response theory of learning and therefore to presuppose that the individual is exposed to the attitudes and habits of a culture through processes that are reinforced by repetition, by the pleasures of reward and the pains of punishment. . . . Clark Hull and Frederick Skinner . . . .”  (p. 55)

“More strictly in terms of epistemology, the metacultural assumption of behaviorists is something like this:  truth is the product of man’s effective grasp of the basic rules, skills, customs, and knowledge already embodied in the given objective reality, including the reality of culture.  Educationally, the acquiring process is chiefly one of adjustment. . . . the behaviorist is an ally . . . of the kind of educator who believes that the school is primarily an agency of cultural reinforcement.” (pp. 55-56)

“According to this second view, man acquires by a process of inquiring into the nature of his culture.  And inquiring, as John Dewey implies . . . , is man’s capacity to engage actively and critically in the events of his cultural experience — to take them apart, as it were, and to rearrange them in more satisfying, efficient, workable ways than before.”  (p. 56)

“. . . the second viewpoint (which we may call functionalism) thinks of mind more as a verb than as a noun — that is, as a special way of acting called ‘inquiring’ or ‘intelligent functioning.’ . . . . In Dewey’s terms, human beings carry on transactions with their environment, and thus with their culture, through which both ‘parties’ to the transaction are altered.”  (p. 56)

“The chief philosophies of education that come to mind when we look at the acquiring process in these alternative ways are, once more, the essentialist and progressivist.  The essentialist tends to take a conditioning view of learning . . . .”  (p. 57)

“By contrast, the progressivist assumes that when men acquire knowledge of culture they do not and certainly need not engage merely in ‘passive mentation’ but may learn also how to inquire into the conditions that have compelled them to acquire that knowledge in habitual ways. . . . [this practice] leads to an active reconstructive conception of learning defined as a transaction in which both poles of the epistemological equation — the knower and the known, the learner and the culture learned — are both modified.”  (p. 57)

Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives I

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Metacultural assumptions of culture

“We call the assumptions or presuppositions of culture metacultural because they lie, strictly speaking, beyond or above or beneath an exclusively scientific description.  and since philosophy is itself sometimes defined as the critical study of assumptions, let us for present purposes call the philosophy of culture a metacultural discipline.”  (p. 45)

The reality of cultural order

“One of the most interesting contributions to the study of culture is Alfred L. Kroeber’s concept of the superorganic. . . . Culture, however, is a level above that of the merely organic.  It has emerged from the organic, to be sure, but, like other emergent levels of nature that have evolved from lower levels, culture has acquired its own distinctive features that are explicable in their own scientific terms.”  (p. 47)

Leslie White in The Science of Culture, explains that “culture causes culture, as it were.  Thus, the order of culture is subject to its own laws, just as the order of the biological level of nature is subject to its own laws. . . . These laws are located most centrally in the patterns [for instance, patterns of language, patterns of custom] of culture.”  (p. 47)

“The metacultural assumption implicit in this viewpoint of cultural order may be associated with a cluster of philosophic beliefs that we shall characterize as belonging to ontological realism. . . . Thus, culture too is an objective reality, just as are other levels of nature.”  (p. 47)

“Some ontological realists have been called historical materialists because they hold not only that culture has an objective reality which generates itself but that this occurs according to historical laws which are explicable in terms of the utilization of material energy in increasing complex ways.  That is, the spatiotemporal order of culture is to be viewed most fundamentally according to ways people channel the energies of nature in order to produce economic goods.”  (p. 48)

“A related but far from identical view of reality of culture . . . is called by philosophers objective idealism. . . . it is perhaps enough to recall that this theory of reality assumes that, although reality is governed by its own objective laws of stability and change, the ‘stuff’ of reality is not ‘material’ but rather ‘spiritual’ in character.”  (p. 48)

“Is it possible for one to hold a kind of superorganic view of culture and yet to be an idealist in one’s metacultural assumptions?  We think that it is.  One such proponent is the philosophically minded sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. . . . Sorokin tries to establish the basic laws of the history of culture which, despite their complexity, follow in a certain sequence, one upon the other, and are primarily characterized by the way human beings think and feel and then behave according to their thinking and feeling.  Culture has an objective reality, but this reality is spiritual in its innermost nature.”  (p. 49)

“The superorganic approach to cultural order is congenial to both the essentialist and perennialist orientations.”  (p. 51)

“Our chief conclusion is that . . . essentialism provides powerful theoretical support for the common view that education’s primary role is to induct each generation into the objective order of culture — an order that has already emerged in nature and is now waiting to be perceived and transmitted according to its own inherent laws.”  (p. 52)

“The operational approach to culture, on the other hand, has close affinity to the progressivist and reconstructionist views of education. . . . progressivists hold an operational theory of culture in the respect that they believe its members should learn how to interpret the meaning of various patterns of culture, not so much for the purpose of perpetuating them — although this role is also a necessary one — but, most importantly, for the purpose of modifying them through such operations.”  (p. 52)

Chapter 3, What is Culture?

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Tylor’s Definition and Its Implications

“The most famous definition of culture was published in 1871 by that giant figure in the history of anthropology, Edward B. Tylor…’Culture’, he said, ‘is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.'” (p. 31)

“What does a culture have that a society does not?”  (p. 32)

“We now examine three of them [the terms from Tylor’s definition] in a somewhat wider context:  the term ‘complex whole,’ which points  to the order of culture; the term ‘acquiring,’ which points to the process of culture; and the term ‘morals,’ which points (with the help of art and custom) to the goals of culture.”  (p. 35)

“Let us state a general proposition.  Wherever you view it — on a worldwide scale or in a small community or even as one family — every culture consists of three interrelated dimensions:  order, process, and goals.  It is impossible to think of any culture without all three.”  (p. 35)

The Order of Culture

“Cultures may be constructed, first of all, in terms of spatial models.” (p. 36)

“The total effect [of flying above the city of Boston, for instance] is that of a complex whole that we view, as it were, ‘horizontally’ from above.” (p. 36)

“But this simple spatial model [concentric, horizontal circles] is incomplete until we recognize that the widening circles are not in fact merely horizontal.  Cultures are ‘vertical’, too, in that their orders extend up and down as well as sidewise.  If we think of our model now as a kind of elaborate cake, we at once perceive that cultures consist of layers or strata — of people living above and below one another — and we can view their different habits, beliefs, arts, morals, and practices only by slicing the cake.  It symbolizes the fact that people live on different levels according to their prestige, income, kinship patterns, class status.”  (p. 37)

“But, actually, Boston as an American subculture has a fascinating history, too.  A physicist might say that it is in a ‘space-time continuum’ — that it is not three-dimensional, after all, but four-dimensional.  Culture, in short, has a past, present, and future as well as horizontal and vertical structure.” (p. 37)

“As we shall see, all cultures evolve through time in some form or other, although anthropologists argue with one another about exactly what evolution means to the temporal order of culture.”  (p. 38)

The Process of Culture

“Process is really the aspect concerned with the dynamics of cultural change.”  (p. 38)

“Let us try to exemplify this contention by recalling an earlier one — that the central process of culture is acquiring.  Anthropologists often use the term enculturation to characterize this process.  A child becomes enculturated as he gradually acquires the beliefs, morals, habits, and other characteristics of the culture into which he is born, and as he then adapts and modifies them to suit the changing space-time continuum of his own cultural experience.”  (p. 38)

“Enculturation, however, is manifested in a number of more specific processes, one of the most important being acculturation — the process by which members of one culture acquire some of the characteristics of another culture through contact — usually direct continuous contact over a fairly long period of time.” (p. 38)

“Also fundamental is the process of assimilation.  When acculturation continues so long and so persistently that you can no longer distinguish one culture, or even some phase of that culture, from another, then we say that assimilation has occurred.”  (p. 39)

“Bostonians whose ancestors came to America in the eighteenth century are more assimilated than many Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans, although one also finds in both these groups examples of fairly complete assimilation.  In speech, for example, the younger generation of Irish-Americans have lost so much of the brogue of their grandparents that only an expert might detect their original culture by listening to them.  Yet, in some of their customs and values they are by no means completely assimilated.  As a matter of fact, Irish-Americans have made a deep acculturative impress upon the remainder of the Boston subculture through their political acumen and the power of their religous organizations.”  (p. 39)

“Why has there been so much unrest on that great continent [Africa]?  Part of the reason, surely, is the boomerang effect called nativism — a process resulting from the attempt of one culture to impose itself too rapidly upon another culture.  Especially in South Africa, the nativist reaction to foreign culture is one of resistance, hostility, and violence.”  (p. 40)

“Of great importance to teachers is the realization that one becomes enculturated by no means merely in a verbal or intellectual way, but viscerally, muscularly, emotionally.  One acquires the habits of cultural membership not in the mind alone, but in habits of action and practice.”  (p. 40)

The Goals of Culture

“The first problem is whether every culture has its own unique goals that belong to it alone, or whether there are some goals that cut across and are common to many cultures.  Here is the cultural version of the old problem of relative and universal values.”  (p. 40)

Using the example of James Michener’s novel Hawaii, “the relativist is one who says we must evaluate every culture by its own goals and not by our goals.  If we judge the morals of the indigenous Hawaiian culture by our values, we commit the fallacy of ethnocentrism — of assuming that all ethnic groups should be praised or blamed according to whether they reflect our own central values.”  (p. 41)

“In any case, does it follow from the fact of any universal values that they are also necessarily desirable — that they are worth believing in?  That is to say, is it not one thing to describe values scientifically, as anthropologists try to do, but quite another thing to show that these values are worth committing ourselves to — that they are goals we can wholeheartedly fight for?”  (p. 42)

“Suppose we agree that there is a sense in which ‘all men are brothers’ and, hence, that brotherhood is a kind of universal value.  But how desirable is it really?  The test of its desirability lies in whether we in the United States, for example, would be willing to join with people of other nations in a common form of political organization where traditional relativistic values are, at least in part, abrogated in favor of the universal value of world citizenship.”  (p. 42)

Chapter Two, The Use of Explosive Ideas in Education

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

How We Shall Proceed

“The first chapter of each section considers the nature of the explosive idea itself.”  (p. 16)

“The second chapter in the three-stage design recalls the bridge of philosophy….What does a respective idea mean when its assumptions are critically analyzed by philosophic specialists?” (p. 17)

“Insofar as each third chapter is successful, it demonstrates how professional education becomes dependent upon basic knowledge from other sources than education.”  (p. 17)

Anticipating the Explosive Ideas

“Why, then, were they [culture, class, and evolution] selected?”  (p. 17)

The Functions of Philosophy

“One, epistemology, is concerned with examining and establishing criteria of reliable knowledge.  A second, ontology (sometimes defined synonymously with metaphysics), tries to discover criteria of reality.  A third, axiology, searches for criteria of value.”  (p. 19)

“To what extent do children in the South obtain unbiased knowledge of the Negro problem?  To what extent do children anywhere in America obtain a picture of economic and political events not colored by the propaganda or vested interests of some official or unofficial pressure group?  To what extent, also, do they have opportunity to consider under critical and responsible educational direction the changing mores of our age — especially the values of sexual morality?”  (p. 20)

Types of Educational Philosophy

“Idealists, for example, are idealistic ontologists — that is, they discover the principles of reality in their conception of the universe as spiritual or mental in substance.”  (p. 21)

“Materialists are materialistic axiologists — that is, they find the meaning of value in material events such as economic patterns.”  (p. 21)

“Pragmatists are pragmatic epistemologists — that is, truths are determined by their practical workability in ongoing experience.”  (p. 21)

“Let us call our own preferred types by the following four terms:  essentialism, progressivism, perennialism, and reconstructionism.”  (p. 22)

The Sphere of Practice

“Each of the following three sections concludes with a chapter of application to educational problems and activities.  The practices selected — curriculum, learning-teaching, and control — are obvious enough at first glance.”  (p. 24)

“To mention one other that will interest us again:  concomitant learning is the sort that occurs through direct association with people — usually through informally rather than formally planned experiences.”  (p. 25)

“One widely held view of teaching that we must be wary of is to identify it with indoctrination.” (p. 26)

Control:  “Who shall determine the policies of education?  How shall they be determined?  Who shall carry them out?” (p. 26)

“Should not teachers and even students also have a voice?  And what about the state and federal governments?”  (p. 26)

Chapter One, The Bridges of Theory and Practice

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

“Assuming that philosophy is the most comprehensive of all forms of theory, how does one relate to practice so that theory makes a real difference to practice and is in turn improved by practice?”

“Do [teachers] always understand why they are doing what they do?  Do they clearly grasp the purposes for which they act as they act?  Do they perceive the network of relations of the particular facts or skills that they teach to the more general obligations of education?  Above all, do they recognize that education is never just an activity in and for itself but is, rather, an invention of the human species designed to improve its lot in the wider environment of society, nature, and even the universe?” (p. 5)

“How is it possible to bring philosophic theories into dynamic connection with theories of, let us say, science or art?  How, in turn, are these theories to be related to the practice of particular sciences or particular arts?  And, finally, how can philosophy, the sciences, and arts come to bear directly upon the myriad activities of classrooms, playgrounds, administrative offices, and the communities that support all of these activities?”  (p. 7)

“For what we are urging, along with specialization in philosophy, science, art, and education is interspecialization — in short, a way by which each particular field can be brought into relationship with other fields.  Let us call this the multidisciplinary approach.”  (p. 7)

“The model we choose to construct consists of three interconnected bridges.  On the left is the bridge of the arts and sciences:  the great body of theory, knowledge, and creative achievement encompassed by these fields.  On the right is the bridge of educational practice:  the daily work of the student, teachers, and administrator — in short, the program of the typical college and school.  In the middle is the bridge of philosophy:  it connects the disciplines of the sciences and arts on the left side of the model with educational practice on the right side.”  (p. 9)

“But what do all three connecting brides connect with in turn?”  (p. 9)

The Bridge of Philosophy

“Philosophies of education, as they are traditionally studied, tend toward this [comparative systems of Western philosophy] latter form.  Students are exposed to so-called systems under such rubrics as idealism, realism, pragmatism, scholasticism, and now quite often, existentialism and logical positivism.”  (pp. 11-12)

“Granting, of course, that the very notion of usefulness may seem anathema to purists of philosophic lore, how can philosophy become more useful?”  (p. 12)

“What then, more specifically, is the role philosophy performs in its mediating station between the arts and sciences, on one side, and professional practice, on the other side?”  (p. 12)

The Bridge of Arts and Sciences

“What then, is most relevant?”  (p. 14)

“But what explosive ideas?”  (p. 14)

The Bridge of Educational Practice

“While it is surely true that theory, especially philosophic theory, clarifies practice, we should never forget that the application of philosophy to institutional experience pays rich dividends back into philosophy.”  (p. 15)

“What then shall we say is the rationale of this book?”  (p. 15)

“It includes three indispensable bridges of knowledge and experience:  (1)  explosive ideas from the arts and sciences, (2) philosophies of education, and (3) representative practices of education.”  (p. 15)

Preface

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Brameld sees his purpose as three-fold:

1.  “drawing educationists and academicians together into a single large framework”, p. xvii

2.  “this is a book in philosophic theory”, ibid.

3.  “it is almost equally a book in the liberal arts as well as a book in the practice of education”, ibid.

“It’s primary purpose is to bring the resources of these three fields together because all of them are imperative to the task of professional education in our day.”

Recall:

This book was first published in 1965.  Theodore Brameld (1904-1987) earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago and spent his academic career at New York University and Boston University.  In the Preface, he thanks his colleagues at Boston University.  So, I gather this book was written during his tenure at Boston University.  He is most noted for being a progressive and a reconstructionist.

source:  http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1800/Brameld-Theodore-1904-1987.html