School Literacy, Reasoning, and Civility: An Anthropologist’s Perspective

This paper takes a perspective on schools, teaching, and learning that places in the foreground the social organization and cultural patterning of people's work in everyday life. In that perspective the notion of as knowledge and skill taught and learned in school, is not separable from the concrete circumstances of its uses inside and outside school, nor is it easily separable from the situation of its acquisition in the school as a social form and as a way of life. The school can be seen as an arena of political negotiation that embodies individual and group interests and ideologies. It is reasonable to expect that various kinds of literacies might represent a variety of interests and be embedded in a variety of belief systems. We can distinguish analytically between literacy and schooling, or between the arithmetical analog numeracy, and schooling, or between the latest manifestation, computer literacy, and schooling. In ordinary usage, however, the distinction between formal knowledge and school is blurred. This may be for good reasons, some of which I will explore in the discussion that follows. Literally, literacy refers to knowledge of letters and of their use in reading and writing, just as the ugly word numeracy refers to knowledge and use of numbers. But to be lettered means more than this, and has done so in the West since the establishment of European schools by the monastic chapters of cathedrals in the early Middle Ages. Literacy, as being lettered, has to do with strategy and prestige. This prestige is partly due to the strategic power that comes from mastery of an information communication system. This prestige also is derived from values of aesthetics and moral virtue which mask the issue of power. Indeed, in 17th century English, to be lewd is not to be sexually unrestrained, but to be unlettered. It is only later in English usage that lewdness took on sexual connotations, which gradually became the main usage. The prestigefulness of schooling also mixes power with the justification of power in morality. One is reminded that in the West, the institution of schooling began in the medieval Church, with literacy justified as a means to specialized knowledge that could be employed in maintaining the intellectual and social structure of the Church, which was seen as a means to collective and individual salvation. The same special knowledge of letters and numbers was also employed in maintaining the rule of secular landholders, whose growth and whose systems for distribution of food enabled the existence of feudal society itself. In colonial New England the institution of public schooling was also justified on moral grounds, with knowledge of letters being the route to individual salvation through reading the Bible, and the same specialized knowledge applying in the development of small freehold agriculture, commerce, and eventually industry. In the comments that follow I do not want to reduce schooling to a set of purely utilitarian functions, nor do I want to do so with literacy. But relationships between the various utilities and moralities of