The schoolyard gate: Schooling and childhood in global perspective

Journal of Social History

Volumn 38, Issue 4 SPEC. ISS., 2005, Pages 987-1006

  Anderson Levitt, Kathryn M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DEARBORN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 22544482943     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2005.0042     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. Two and two four/ four and four eight/ eight and eight are sixteen/ Repeat! says the teacher/ Two and two four/ four and four eight/ eight and eight are sixteen./ But there the Iyre-bird/ passes by in the sky/ the child sees it/the child hears it/ the child calls to it:/ Take me away/ play with me/ bird! ... "Page d'écriture" in Paroles, Paris: Gallimard, 1972, 145, my translation.
2. Elsie Rockwell, "Recovering History in the Study of Schooling: From Longue Durée to Everyday Co-Construction," Human Development 42 (1999): 113-128, p. 125.
3. John D'Amato, "Resistance and Compliance in Minority Classrooms," in Minority Education: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Evelyn Jacob and Cathie Jordan (Norwood, NJ, 1993).
4. D'Amato, 188. He also cites as reasons for resistance the "contentious" nature of instructional interaction, which requires students to compete in publicly evaluated displays of knowledge, and the fact that students are taught in groups, so that resistance can become a group norm.
5. D'Amato, 189.
6. D'Amato, 191. The point about involuntary minorities builds on John Ogbu's theory; see, for example, John U. Ogbu, Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York, 1978);
7. John U. Ogbu and Herbert D. Simons, "Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 29 (1998): 155-188.
8. Recent evidence of the persistence of job ceilings comes from Marianne Bertrand and Senhil Mullainathan, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," National Bureau of Economic Research, available at http://www.nber.org/papers/ W9873.pdf2003.
9. Ogbu's theory is very influential, although it has been challenged in the case of gender (Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, "Why Does Jane Read and Write So Well? The Anomaly of Women's Achievement," Sociology of Education 62 [1989]: 47-63)
10. and in the case of some European countries (Margaret A. Gibson, "Complicating the Immigrant/Involuntary Minority Typology," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 28 [1998]: 431-454).
11. D'Amato, 191. The value of culturally relevant pedagogy, in this context, is that it increases intrinsic rewards by according more respect to students and thus making the classroom more appealing.
12. Granted, there were exceptions; I encountered an urban schools that held no recess for its afternoon session on the grounds that many children would have gone home and not come back during that hottest part of the day.
13. Elsie Rockwell, "Ethnography and the Commitment to Public Schooling: A Review of Research at the DIE," in Educational Qualitative Research in Latin America: The Struggle for a New Paradigm, ed. Gary Anderson and Martha Montero-Sieburth (New York, 1998).
14. For example Margaret Mead, "The Education of the Samoan Child," chapter 3 in Coming of Age in Samoa (New York, 1928).
15. Yehudi A. Cohen, "The Shaping of Men's Minds: Adaptations to Imperatives of Culture," in Schooling the Symbolic Animal: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Education, ed. Bradley A. U. Levinson and others (Lanham, MD, 2000), 86.
16. Jules Henry, "A Cross-Cultural Outline of Education," in Educational Patterns and Cultural Configurations: The Anthropology of Education, ed. Joan I. Roberts and Sherrie K. Akinsanya (New York, 1976).
17. Cohen.
18. See Randall Collins, "Comparative and Historical Patterns of Education," in Handbook of the Sociology of Education, ed. Maureen T. Hallinan (New York, 2000).
19. By 1990, even in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the lowest rate of Western-style schooling, nearly 60 percent of countries had passed a compulsory school law (John Boli and Francisco O. Ramirez, "Compulsory Schooling in the Western Cultural Context," in Emergent Issues in Education: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Robert F. Arnove, Philip G. Altbach, and Gail P. Kelly [Albany, 1992]).
20. "Children" are released from school (whether primary or secondary) at 16 in the United States and Canada, and at ages varying from 15 to 18 in Europe, from 12 to 16 in Central America, and in Asia at ages varying from 10 in Bangladesh to 17 in Japan. The length of compulsory schooling, which may include secondary schooling, ranges from 5 years in some Asian countries to 13 years in the Netherlands. Table 394, Selected Statistics for Countries with Populations over 10 Million, by Continent, "International Comparisons of Education," National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000, available at http://nces.edu.gov/programs/digest/d02/tables/PDF/table 394-pdf, downloaded 2/14/04.
21. Martin Trow defines "mass" participation, as opposed to elite participation, as enrollment of more than 15 percent of an age cohort. We are, however, especially interested in levels of enrollment he labels somewhat misleadingly as "universal participation," that is, greater than 50 percent of an age cohort; Martin Trow, "From Mass Higher Education to Universal Access: The American Advantage," in In Defense of American Higher Education, ed. Philip G. Altbach, Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl (Baltimore, 2001).
22. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1992), 9.
23. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993).
24. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis, 1997).
25. Immanuel Wallerstein, "The Rise and the Future Demise of the Modern World System," in The Globalization Reader, ed. Frank Lechner and John Boli (Maiden, MA, 2000).
26. In response to the first Ptolemaic map in Europe in 1400, according to David Harvey as cited by Bruce Mazlish, "An Introduction to Global History," in Conceptualising Global History, ed. Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (Boulder, CO, 1993), 17. The notion that the "sun never sets on the British empire" evokes an image of the whole world at once, as does the account of the global voyage of the Pequod with its international crew in Moby Dick.
27. The label "world culture" comes from Francisco O. Ramirez, Yasemin Soysal, and Suzanne Shanahan, "The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women's Suffrage Rights, 1890 to 1990," American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 735-745)
28. and from John Boli and George M. Thomas, eds. Constructing World Culture: Internationa/ Nongovernmental Organisations since 1875 (Stanford, CA, 1999).
29. Other authors refer to the ideas of John W. Meyer and his colleagues variously as "institutional theory" (Nitza Berkovitch, From Motherhood To Citizenship: Women's Rights and International Organisations [Baltimore, 1999], 7);
30. as "institutionalism" (Martha Finnemore, "Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology's Institutionalism," International Organization 50 ([1996]: 325-47);
31. "neo-institutionalism" (Benjamin Levin, Reforming Education: From Origins to Outcomes [New York, 2001]);
32. as "global rationalization" (Scott Davies and Neil Guppy, "Globalization and Educational Reforms in Anglo-American Democracies," Comparative Education Review, 41 ([1997]: 435-459);
33. and, somewhat misleadingly, as "world systems theory" (W. K. Cummings, "The InstitutionS [sic] of Education: Compare! Compare! Compare!" Comparative Education Review 43 ([1999]: 413-37).
34. John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas, and Francisco O. Ramirez, "World-Society and the Nation-State, "American Journal of Sociology, 103 (1997): 144-181, 168.
35. Ulf Hannerz, "The World in Creolisation," Africa, 57 (1987): 546-559.
36. Francisco O. Ramirez and John Boli Ramirez, "The Political Construction of Mass Schooling: European Origins and Worldwide Institutionalization," Sociology of Education, 60(1987), 12-17.
37. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez, 168.
38. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt and Ntal-I'Mbirwa Alimasi, "Are Pedagogical Ideals Embraced or Imposed? The Case of Reading Instruction in the Republic of Guinea," in Policy as Practice, eds. Margaret Sutton and Bradley Levinson (Norwood, NJ, 2001).
39. John Boli, Francisco O. Ramirez, and John W. Meyer, "Explaining the Origins and Expansion of Mass Education," in New Approaches to Comparative Education, eds. Philip G. Altbach and Gail Paradise Kelly (Chicago, 1986);
40. Collins (note 13);
41. Brian Platt, this volume.
42. National Center for Educational Statistics (note 16).
43. UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), World Development Report 2000 (Oxford, 2000), 194-197.
44. Again, using Trow's definitions of "mass" (more than 15 percent) and "universal" (more than 50 percent.)
45. Ramirez and Boli (note 25).
46. John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, and Yasemin N. Soysal, "World Expansion of Mass Education, 1870-1980," Sociology of Education, 65 (1992): 128-149, 142.
47. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, "A World Culture of Schooling?" in Local Meanings, Global Schooling: Anthropology and World Culture Theory, ed. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt (New York, 2003).
48. Aaron Benavot, Uyn-Kyung Cha, David H. Kamens, John W. Meyer, and Suk-Ying Wong, "Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Curricula, 1920-1986," in School Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century, eds. John W. Meyer, David H. Kamens, and Aaron Benavot (Washington, DC, 1992).
49. LeTendre, et al.
50. John W. Meyer and Francisco O. Ramirez, "The World Institutionalization of Education," in Discourse Formation in Comparative Education, ed. Jürgen Schriewer (Frankfurt/New York, 2000).
51. To use Raymond Grew's terms from his essay in this volume.
52. UNDP, 197. Note that where there is less than 100 percent participation, gender patterns vary. Whereas girls have a better chance than boys to attend school in certain countries of Latin American and Africa, in the least developed countries as a whole they average only 80 percent a boy's chance of going to school (UNDP, 256-258). I have not yet found data, if they exist, on how many years children actually spend in school in various parts of the world.
53. See Elizabeth Kuznesof in this volume.
54. Joseph J. Tobin, David Y. H. Wu, and Dana H. Davidson, Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States (New Haven, 1989).
55. Alexander, Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education (Maiden, MA, 2001);
56. see also Karen Bogard Givvin, James Hiebert, Jennifer K. Jacobs, Hilary Hollingsworth, and Ronald Gallimore, "Are There National Patterns of Teaching? Evidence from the TIMSS 1999 Video Study," paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, April 21, 2003.
57. Juliana Flinn, "Transmitting Traditional Values in New Schools: Elementary Education of Pulap Atoll," Anthropology and Education Quarterly 23 (1992): 44-59;
58. Elsie Rockwell, "Keys to Appropriation: Rural Schooling in Mexico," in The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice, eds. Bradley Levinson, Douglas Foley, and Dorothy Holland (Albany, NY), 1996.
59. See the chapters in Anderson-Levitt, Local Meanings.
60. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, Teaching Cultures: Cultural Knowledge for Teaching First Grade in France and the United State (Cresskill, NJ, 2002), 32-33.
61. Mathieu Brossard and Aboubacar Sidik Yattara, "Close-Up of an Educational System: Guinea under Scrutiny," ADEA Newsletter (Association for Development of Education in Africa) 15 (2003), 21-24.
62. Caroline Bledsoe, "The Cultural Transformation of Western Education in Sierra Leone," Africa, 62 (1992): 182-202.
63. And perhaps as citizens of the world; Deborah Reed-Danahay, "Europeanization and French Primary Education, in Anderson-Levitt, Local Meanings.
64. Laura Rival, "Formal Schooling and the Production of Modern Citizens in the Ecuadorian Amazon," in Levinson, Foley, and Holland.
65. Beatrice B. Whiting and Carolyn Pope Edwards, Children of Different Worlds (Cambridge, MA, 1988);
66. John M. Whiting, "Adolescent Rituals and Identity Conflicts. In Cultural Psychology: Essays On Comparative Human Development, James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gil Herdt (Cambridge, 1990).
67. Suzanne G. Frayser, Varieties of Sexual Experience (New Haven, CT, 1985).
68. B. Herz, K. Subbarao, M. Habib, and L Raney. "Letting Girls Learn: Promising Approaches in Primary and Secondary Education," World Bank Discussion Papers, no. 133. (Washington, DC, 1991), 29.
69. Tobin et al. (note 41).
70. Caroline Bledsoe, "School Girls and School Fees among the Mende of Sierra Leone," In Beyond The Second Sex, ed. Peggy Sanday and Ruth Goodenough (Philadelphia, 1990).
71. However, adulthood is highly variable across cultures. In rural Ireland it did not come for a man until his aged parents finally retired, at which point he might be in his 40s himself.
72. Biological anthropologists define childhood, a stage unique to human beings, as the stage between eruption of the last baby teeth and the appearance of the first permanent teeth (Barry Bogin, "The Evolution of Human Growth," in Human Growth and Development, ed. Noël Cameron [San Diego, 2002]).
73. Collins (note 13).
74. Describing the severe hazing of initiation in an aboriginal Australian group circa 1900, George Spindler argued, "The whole operation of the initiation school is managed to produce success.... There are no dropouts" ("There Are No Dropouts Among the Arunta and the Hutterites," in Fifty Years of Anthropology And Education 1950-2000, George D. Spindler and Louise Spindler [Mahwah, NJ, 2000], 185). Some of my colleagues in Guinea raise the objection that children actually are permanently typed based on their stoicism during initiation ceremony. However, it is still true that none of them gets officially excluded in the way that opting for a vocational track excludes a student in France from taking the math-oriented baccalaureate exam or failing calculus excludes students from certain career paths in the United States.
75. Collins (note 13), 214.
76. Collins (note 13), 236.
77. The theocracies in Iran and Afghanistan are two apparent recent exceptions. See Ruth Hayhoe, "Modernization without Westernization: Assessing the Chinese Educational Experience," in Emergent Issues in Education: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Robert F. Amove, Philip G. Altbach, and Gail Paradise Kelly (Albany, 1992) for an overview of the transformation of the Chinese system.
78. For families who can afford to invest in a child's secondary and perhaps post-secondary schooling, the fate of the family may depend not on the child's ability to bring in income, as Kuznesof documents in this volume, but rather on the child's ability to pay off on a family investment in his or her schooling.
79. Actually, the situation is more nuanced. Rural children's schools are less likely to lead to adequate academic achievement, and girls face more barriers than boys.
80. Boubacar Bayero Diallo, Parcours scolaires des filles en Afrique: le cas de la Guinée, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Montréal, 2004) illustrates the individual and familial strategies of children, particularly girls, who succeed at getting into secondary school in the Republic of Guinea. These case studies show the students and their families focused on the extrinsic rewards of schooling.
81. Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, "Behind Schedule: Batch-Produced Children in French and U.S. Classrooms," in Levinson, Foley, and Holland; Anderson-Levitt, Teaching Cultures.
82. There is also a tendency built into the structure to attribute problems to a child's parents or home. At least in the North, as Willard Waller pointed out, parent and teacher are natural enemies (The Sociology of Teaching [New York, 1965]). Schooling in the South may not have the same structure built in, and hence the focus may be all the more on the individual child's traits.
83. Anderson-Levitt, Teaching Cultures, 217-219.
84. For the most part. The curriculum in France and in some U.S. schools does allow for a certain circling back to cover in more depth the same content covered a year earlier.
85. Lewis R. Goldberg, "From Ace to Zombie: Some Explorations in the Language of Personality," Advances in Personality Assessment, ed. C. D. Spielberger and J. N. Butcher (Hillsdale, NJ, 1982).
86. For example, M. Wober, "Towards an Understanding of the Kiganda Concept of Intelligence," in Culture and Cognition, John W. Berry and Pierre R. Dasen (London, 1974).
87. Anderson-Levitt, "Behind Schedule."
88. William Stern later converted Binet's concept to the concept of the intelligence quotient or I.Q., which so influences thinking about intelligence in the United States. Like Binet, Stern interpreted his measure of performance as "mental age." However, Stern expressed mental age not as "years behind" or "years ahead" of peers, as Binet had, but rather as a quotient, mental age divided by chronological age. His mathematical transformation of the concept meant that there was no making up a lag; I.Q. was expected to be fixed.
89. Anderson-Levitt, "Behind Schedule." An important point about concepts of intelligence: In the global North, schooling tends to make boys look "stupid," at least in the primary grades where girls outperform them in language arts. In secondary school and higher education, a select subset of boys then begins to look smarter than girls as they outperform girls in math. In contrast, in parts of the global South such as Guinea, schooling constructs "stupidity" in girls. Both teachers we interviewed and girls themselves tended to believe that boys were smarter, as demonstrated by their superior school achievement.
90. The French quote comes from Anderson-Levitt, Teaching Cultures, 201
91. the U.S. quotes are from M. Elizabeth Graue, Ready For What? Constructing Meanings of Readiness for Kindergarten (Albany, 1993), 183 and 193. What counted as "old" or "young" was not exactly the same between France and the United States: a child beginning first grade at the age of 6 years 1 month would be considered "young" in the United States but not particularly young in France.
92. Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super, "The Cultural Construction of Child Development: A Framework for the Socialization of Affect," Ethos 11 (1983): 221-231;
93. Catherine Lutz, "Ethnopsychology Compared to What? Explaining Behavior and Consciousness among the Ifaluk," in Person, Self, and Experience, ed. Geoffrey White and James T. Kirkpatrick (Berkeley, 1985);
94. James T. Kirkpatrick, "Some Marquesan Understandings of Action and Identity," in White and Kirkpatrick.
95. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (trans. by R. Baidick) (New York, 1962);
96. Antoine Prost, Histoire générale de l'enseignement et de l'éducation en France (vol. 4, L'école et la famille dans une société en mutation) (Paris, 1981).
97. Is this analogous to the micro-stages of infancy presented in manuals for new parents? Perhaps, since one month represents a about the same proportion of a baby's first year of life as 5 months - the difference between a "July birthday" and a "December birthday" represents to a first grader. Even so, the question remains - are we recognizing biologically determined stages or creating culturally defined stages?
98. Schools were not always organized that way. The rural French children that Laurence Wylie observed in the 1950s began school on the day of their birthday, whatever the time of year. Some urban school districts in the United States used to let children enter school in either September or January (Village in the Vaucluse, 3d ed. [Cambridge, MA, 1974]).
99. At most, there are two basic forms of primary school classroom organization: the "traditional" face-front age-graded classroom with one teacher and 20-100 students, which was once the modern system that replaced the old one-room school recitationbased classroom; and, secondly, the student-centered classroom with students working on different projects in small groups or individually. I submit that the latter model is not as common as we think, although it is present as an alternative to the standard.