Have you seen this presentation by Howard Rheingold?. Be warned, it’s forty minutes long, but I found it fascinating. Be interested to hear what you think of it.

John

So anyway. Start of the Comment There:

Keith Hart, who kicked off the Open Anth Co-op, commented on teaching and Tim Ingold in another thread started by Jeremy Trombley, Toward an Anthropological Pedagody. Keith wrote:

“Tim Ingold was my first ever student in Cambridge. I was a graduate student just back from the field and he was a second year undergraduate. I was asked to give him some one-on-one supervisions. He blew me away. He knew far more anthropology than I did (which wasn’t difficult since I had been a classicist).maybe that persuaded me that students should lead teachers rather than the other way round.”

Keith also expanded in depth on how he thinks about teaching, which I definitely appreciated:

“I care more about getting the education right than whether or not we would attach to the principles involved a Greek tag of six syllables. It is important to go back to fundamentals.

Education as we know it is the camera obscura of ideology in Marx’s sense, an attempt to persuade people that ideas (as packaged by experts) come before life. This reflects a social order whose priority is to secure compliance to what already exists rather than explore something new. The result is a ‘hose in a bucket’ approach. The student is expected to discard any personal experience in order to be filled with prepackaged ‘knowledge’. Content in this sense, as you say, is useless to anyone who would learn to think for themselves.

You can lecture for knowledge or lecture for belief. I lecture for belief which is to say I want the students to believe that ideas come from life, from my life and implicitly from their own in the context of the long human conversation about a better world. I don’t want to impose my thoughts on theirs, but to help them discover their own. I resist the idea that they should become like me, wishing rather to hitch a ride on their lives, since they will be going places I could never imagine. This principle applies to parenthood with even greater force.

My master in all this is Jean-Jacques Rousseau whose Emile: or on education is my all-time favourite book. It is so revolutionary that the Archbishop of Paris unleashed the hit squads on its author by issuing a fatwah under which Rousseau’s killers would receive the benediction of the church. Essentially he was saying that we are normally in too much of a hurry to make children like oursleves. We reward the speed with which they acquire familiar habits. Any child can learn to entertain dinner guests with a Mozart violin sonata at the age of five if they sacrfice all other activities to that end. Rousseau’s revolutionary idea was that children should be allowed to enjoy doing whatever they are suited for especially at a given age. His book is a fictitious accopunt of hmself as tutor to the boy, Emile, and his girlfriend Sophie, according to what J-J considered to be natural principles of self-development. The goal of his educational system was to help someone become the best person they are capable of, without concern for how this might fit him for contemporary society. At least he went to the root of the problem rather than complain about some of the surface manifestations.

It is worth noting that Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view (1798) was likewise designed as a primer for self-development. The romantic movement as a whole dumped the idea of education as a means of adapting to existing social structure in favour of equipping individuals to do the best they could by relying on what was between their own ears. Renaissance humanism and 20th century existentialism shared some elements of this philosophy and I would prefer to found 21st century anthropology on something similar.

What we take for grantedpo as ‘education’ is based on a formula first articulated by Hegel in The philosophy of right (1821). He prosed states to manage the unequal excesses of capitalism and the latter to discipline the abuse of power by politicians. The common interest would be addressed by a class of university-trained bureaucrats. This programme was realised in stages after the first world war and it is unravelling now. The emphasis on academic research rather than teaching was exclusively a Cold War phenomenon. From now on in we can expect the focus to shift back to bums on seats, teaching in other words. Universities have been around for a millennium, but what we think they are was only established in the 1960s and has been running out of juice ever since. I will leave it there, but at this point I am clearly seguing into the discussion on Ingold and students are natives. This overlap is hardly accidental, since we need to rethink social models and anthropology offers an off-centre vantage point for doing so.”

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Whoops. That last message wasn’t the message I created when I tried to respond to what Daniel Lende so eloquently wrote. Let me try again.

There is so much in Daniel’s message; it reminds me of a banana split with three flavors of ice cream, chocolate and caramel sauce. Delicious but where to begin. I proceed from silly to serious.

Re Hegel: I recall Hal Walsh, a philosophy professor at Michigan State (the time was circa 1963) that, “Hegel was the first great philosopher who was both a university professor and a married man. It’s been downhill ever since.”

Re Rousseau and Kant: Don’t both assume a universal goodness/rationality that is bound to emerge once human beings are freed from the distortions and corruptions of society, an idea that reaches its apotheosis in rational choice theory and market fundamentalism, in which all human beings are assumed to behave rationally in pursuit of their own interests? How does this square with the anthropological observation that human infants take a long time to be socialized into some particular kind of human being, and Clifford Geertz’s assertion that there is no universal actor behind the lines and costumes some particular culture provides?

Re the notion of teaching as pouring water into empty buckets: When I was teaching seminars on advertising and marketing, I proposed to my students that knowledge creation is picture making. There are, however, two kinds of pictures, those found in jigsaw puzzles and those created when an artist confronts a blank canvas. The former are convenient for both students and teachers; the object of the exercise and the measure of its success are getting all the pieces and getting them in the right places. This exercise is easy to grade. The latter are inconvenient. As in art school, the teacher introduces materials and techniques, requires exercises that put them to work, offer hints as the students’ projects develop. But how are the results to be graded? Who decides when a work of art is finished? Who decides whether the work is impressive or dull or tasteless? These judgments are inevitably subjective.

I then offer a word of advice that I was given at the start of the thirteen years I spent as a copywriter and creative director at a large Japanese advertising agency. A wise woman named Alice Buzzarte told me, “John, to succeed in this business you will need a thick skin. You have to realize that three out of four of your brilliant ideas are going straight into the trash can.” I follow by observing that in all the time I spent at the agency, I never saw anyone paid big bucks for repeating what others had already done. A creator might start with something “like that,” having in mind an ad seen in another context, but no comment was more damning than “already been done.” Without some new angle or twist, that idea was dead.

Now the ad industry takes to an extreme the endless pursuit of the new and different that everyone talks about these days (including, I note, academics trying to get things published). There are still plenty of industries where repetitive physical labor is needed. But given these two extremes, knowledge-creation and mass-production, it is, advanced business thinkers believe, the former that is now the primary source of value in the postmodern, post-industrial global economy. How to educate knowledge workers is a hot topic for politicians as well as business leaders. I wonder what anthropologists can contribute to this debate.

He also made a pretty thought provoking point when he asked where anthropology ends and begins–does it end in the field, and ultimately result in publications that students use to experience the discipline in a second hand manner? Or is anthropology a kind of philosophical endeavor that continues long after fieldwork, and one that includes the process of learning and exploration that exists in universities?

Daniel wrote:

“Here is what I do take way from Ingold’s lecture. We can learn something about how we do anthropology by paying attention to our students, by seeing the field as all around us, and by embracing anthropology as a way of interacting with the world.”

I agree. Although there is also the possibility of jettisoning the whole idea of the “field,” which is kind of an abstraction in and of itself. There are, after all, plenty of essays that talk about the difficulties of figuring out where the field begins and ends–and maybe that’s all just in our heads so that we can try to distinguish between work and regular life “off the clock.” Who knows. Maybe the field is everywhere, or maybe there is no field and anthropology applies everywhere, at all times. Six to one…

Jon Elster wrote once that french universities work in a sort of feudal way, while their american counterparts have incorporated the principles of free market more openly. I´m not sure if that´s quite right; but I do think that academia often acts like a medieval guild, where apprentices, officers and masters work within frameworks quite different from those of capitalist relations.

It´s not a very pleasing analogy, but I think it sheds some light on the way students are treated.