Cultural Discontinuities and Schooling

Anthropologists have long hypothesized that major differences in the school experiences of various populations lie in the discontinuities between their cultural backgrounds and the culture of the schools. Research has, therefore, generally focused on differences in cultural values, cognitive, motivational, communicative, and interactional domains that are presumed to affect school experience. This paper attempts to refine the cultural discontinuity hypothesis by distinguishing between three types of discontinuities: universal, primary, and secondary discontinuities. It is suggested that each is more or less associated with a distinct type of school “problems” and that some problems of racial or castelike minority students in societies like the United States arise principally from secondary cultural discontinuities. ANTHROPOLOGY, BLACK AMERICANS, CULTURAL DISCONTINUITIES, CULTURAL PLURALISM, MINORITY EDUCATION.