Education and Cultural Transmission: Historical Studies of Continuity and Change in Families, Schooling and Youth Cultures.Edited by Johan Sturm, Jeroen Dekker, Richard Aldrich Richard Aldrich (31 July 1863 Providence, Rhode Island - 2 June 1937, Rome) was an American music critic. From 1902 to 1923 he was music critic for the New York Times. Publications
Pedagogy as a field for scholarly contemplation was rarely conceived in European society in so narrowly technical a sense as in the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. . Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that a solid European institutional basis exists for the historical examination of education writ very large, in the sense that almost two scholarly generations ago Bernard Bailyn Bernard Bailyn (b. 1922, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American historian, author, and professor specializing in U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era History. He has been a professor at Harvard since 1953, and has won the Pulitzer Prize for History twice (in 1968 and 1987). enjoined upon Americans: as pertaining per·tain intr.v. per·tained, per·tain·ing, per·tains 1. To have reference; relate: evidence that pertains to the accident. 2. to the sum of social arrangements that instructed or initiated the young in the patterned beliefs and behaviors that maintain the social order. "Family history" and "the history of childhood" were engaged in the United States as often recognized subfields of social history, while the history of education so-denominated continued to give pride of place to institutions of formal education. But in Europe, as this volume from Belgium indicates, these realms are conceived in a more unitary fashion, as "the role of families, schools, and youth cultures in the transmission of knowledge, values and attitudes, ... [the] ways that social and political structures and power relations [have] determined the content and features of educational processes and vice versa VICE VERSA. On the contrary; on opposite sides. " (10). Nevertheless, despite the apparently superior institutional framework available in Europe, the results in this particular volume are anything but smoothly articulated. (Surely, a part of this is owing simply to the international-symposium format.) The editorial apparatus and several of the articles in the first section are given over to the now-contested notions of education, culture, and the relationship of cultural transmission and cultural transformation, a discussion (although my response no doubt betrays my engagement in the less-philosophical, more-empirical American tradition of scholarship) that does not seem to offer a great deal that is fresh or reorienting to someone who knows why "socialization socialization /so·cial·iza·tion/ (so?shal-i-za´shun) the process by which society integrates the individual and the individual learns to behave in socially acceptable ways. so·cial·i·za·tion n. " in its 1960s-80s sense no longer serves our purposes, and who pays at all comfortable intellectual obeisance to agency and diversity. Where the volume "works" at all well for me is in some (but not most) of the topical essays, in which I learned many things new to me. Shulamith Shahar's work on medieval European conceptions of early childhood is sharply delineated de·lin·e·ate tr.v. de·lin·e·at·ed, de·lin·e·at·ing, de·lin·e·ates 1. To draw or trace the outline of; sketch out. 2. To represent pictorially; depict. 3. and sets up a clear distinction with the early-modern childhood we more often learn about. Rudolf Dekker's analysis of two-and-one-half centuries of Dutch autobiographies makes a superb case for the emergence after the Enlightenment of a new sense of memory along with an awakened a·wak·en tr. & intr.v. a·wak·ened, a·wak·en·ing, a·wak·ens To awake; waken. See Usage Note at wake1. [Middle English awakenen, from Old English interest in one's own childhood as a putative source of one's adult self. Mark S. Johnson's account of the repression of youth "delinquency" and, along with it, the distinctive Soviet science of "pedology pedology A branch of soil science focusing on the formation, morphology, and classification of soils as bodies within the natural landscape. Pedology seeks to understand how the properties and distribution patterns of soils worldwide (collectively called the pedosphere) have " in the mid-1930s is chilling in itself, and reminds one how politically unnerving un·nerve tr.v. un·nerved, un·nerv·ing, un·nerves 1. To deprive of fortitude, strength, or firmness of purpose. 2. To make nervous or upset. the apparent failure to transmit a fragile culture to the upcoming generation may seem to a society's leaders. Stephen Harp's account of the succession of French, German, and (once again) French instructional regimes in nineteenth and twentieth century Alsace-Lorraine straightforwardly (indeed, courageously) attempts to measure the extent to which formal education can promote a sense of national identity in a bilingual region. These four favorite essays, as it happens, each appears in a different one of the book's four sections: "Family, Culture and Education," "Education and Cultural Transmission," "Youth Culture and Education," and "School Culture and Education." None (except for the first) seems to me distinctly to belong to its section, and while this might be said to follow from the complexity of the issues at hand, I think that instead it is because the book is not so much edited as assembled. Indeed, the volume is better seen as a special issue of a broadly-defined journal. John Modell Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University, at Pittsburgh, Pa.; est. 1967 through the merger of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (founded 1900, opened 1905) and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (founded 1913). |
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