Extracurriculars: School’s Many Hidden Lessons

I’ve recently started substitute teaching, which is a fascinating vantage point from which to conduct all manner of ethnography. Having previously tutored at an assortment of after-school programs targeted specifically towards assisting students who struggle in school, I have long been aware of how much academic success is connected to the mastery of specific behavioral patterns. For instance, the abilities to sit still and quietly for long periods of time, to process information delivered orally and received aurally, and to adhere strictly to deadlines and time schedules, are, I would propose, more closely correlated to success in school than is intelligence.

I was recently linked to an article entitled The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which pretty clearly delineates a number of the implicit cultural lessons which the structure of the American public school system tends to promote. It’s not too long, so I highly recommend you pop over and give it a read, but to summarize, the six lessons he highlights are (1) stay wherever you are told you belong, (2) learn to awaken and dismiss interest in a topic on command, (3) surrender your will to arbitrary authority, (4) ignore your own interests and focus on what you are told to engage with, (5) depend on the assessments of others for your own sense of self-worth, and (6) expect constant surveillance, giving up all claims to privacy.

I have certainly seen each of these lessons in action in schools scattered across the country (and, during the past several days of substituting, have been expected to advance them myself), and would guess they are pretty universal, at least among American public schools. And yet I don’t think most teachers sit down and consciously decide that these lessons are particularly valuable, and then contemplate how best to reinforce them in the classroom. Rather, I suspect that they organize their classrooms in the ways that they do because (1) that is how their classrooms were organized when they were students, (2) their teaching instructors have taught them specific mechanisms of classroom management, and (3) they have found that the type of teaching they are expected to do tends to be easier under the conditions these organizational structures and classroom management mechanisms foster. They most likely don’t stop to wonder what more global behavioral lessons are being taught, and how these might affect the expectations, inclinations, and abilities of their students in other circumstances.

I’m not arguing that these lessons are inherently evil or terrible (as with regard to fashion, that might be an argument I would make if asked, but it isn’t the one I’m making here). I’m merely noting that these are lessons that are being taught, even though the people who are teaching them did not intentionally set out to do so, and might or might not agree that they should be taught if they were asked overtly.

I suspect that the extent to which schools teach all manner of cultural lessons beyond those explicitly listed in the curriculum is markedly underestimated, by teachers and students alike. I will present one example of this. Today, I administered a writing prompt which asked students to take a position on the question of whether or not schools should stop selling soda pop and other unhealthy snacks in vending machines and cafeterias in response to rising obesity levels and other health problems among adolescents. Afterwards, I snuck a peek at the responses. I was impressed by the variety of points which the students (most of whom argued against the change) raised to support their position—it might decrease school concession revenues, students could procure unhealthy foods elsewhere, health-conscious students who wanted an occasional snack should not be penalized for the lack of self-control of unhealthy students, and even (my personal favorite for cultural insight) that it might lead to targeting and bullying of overweight students perceived to be the cause of the change.

Students arguing in favor of the change had little to support their argument beyond repeating the claims made in the prompt about rising levels of adolescent obesity. They pointed out that limiting the availability of snack foods would force students to eat more healthily while in school, though many lamented that this would probably not do much good overall, since unhealthy foods would still be available elsewhere. Interestingly, nobody mentioned the observation I personally considered most compelling—that the structural set-up of schools teaches all manner of implicit lessons, and that the presence or absence of junk food amongst school fare offerings is likely to shape students’ perceptions of typical, appropriate, or desirable meals and snacks.

If students walk into the school cafeteria every day to a salad bar, whole-grain-bread sandwiches, and fruit, as opposed to a smorgasbord of greasy pizza, french fries, and donuts, this will contribute to their image of what a good meal should look like, whether or not there is somebody standing there lecturing about proper dietary habits. (Indeed, as I have mentioned several times already, I personally believe that such implicit messages can be even more influential than ones overt enough to alert us to the fact that somebody is trying to persuade us of something.)

This is especially true at school, since it provides a pervasive (students are there five days a week, nine months a year, for 12+ years of their life) model which on many other levels is presented as a place of preparation for appropriate behavior “out in the real world.” So I propose that even though unhealthy foods would still be available in other places, such as at home or at stores and fast food restaurants, students would be less likely to think of purchasing these things when they were in these places if such foods fell outside of those students’ mental image of a typical thing to consume.

(If you don’t believe this, think about your own shopping habits. Daily, weekly, or monthly, you walk into a grocery store that I am guessing is filled with hundreds if not thousands of products that you have never purchased and would never think of purchasing. The things you do purchase probably fall within a specific and fairly consistent subset shaped by the sorts of things your parents would buy, as well as by various other regular food-providing places in your past.)

I found it interesting that not a single student mentioned the particularly formative role that schools play in providing a model of desirable behavior—even though they are currently personally immersed in precisely that process. I take it as an indication of precisely how unconscious we all may be of the strongest sources of cultural influence in our day-to-day lives.

Who Is This Everyday Anthropologist?

(And what, exactly, IS anthropology, anyway?)

Hello, my name is Elizabeth Edwards, and I will be your anthropologist for the day. Perhaps even for the everyday (that's my personal goal, at least). But before I can convince you to give me a perch somewhere inside your brain, from whence I hope to whisper anthropological nothings into your ear as you wander through your daily life, I should probably tell you a little bit about myself.

I have recently completed my master's degree, with an emphasis in anthropology, through the University of Chicago's intensive one-year Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS). This was the first time the official title of "Anthropologist" was ever bestowed upon me, and in fact it was only a little under three years ago that I first considered seeking such a title for myself. But, unbeknownst even to me, I was an anthropologist long before I had any kind of clear idea what the term meant.

In fact, let's pause for a moment to define the term "anthropology," because I've noticed of late that its meaning is not exactly straightforward or widely understood.

Anthropology Defined

First of all, an anthropologist is NOT the same thing as an archaeologist. (I've realized that the two words are very closely linked in many people's minds, a discovery achieved through extensive ethnographic observation—by which, in this case, I mean telling people that I'm studying anthropology, and noticing that the most frequent response is "Oh, so do you go on a lot of digs?")

"Anthropology" comes from the Greek word "anthropos," meaning "human," and thus an anthropologist is someone who studies humans or humanity. An archaeologist is a specific kind of anthropologist—one who studies ancient societies. ("Archaeology" comes from the Greek word "arkhaios," meaning "ancient.") This often involves excavation, but extends beyond that to assorted other techniques and processes as well.

Anthropology, in turn, extends far beyond the archaeological. Other subfields of the discipline include physical anthropology (the study of the human body, ranging from evolutionary studies of humanity's ancestors through modern medical study), linguistic anthropology (the study of language, including its components and development), and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology is my personal area of specialization, and involves (as the name suggests) the study of culture, though the question of what precisely "culture" entails turns out to be particularly tricky to pin down.

Culture (Provisionally) Defined

The word "culture" comes from the same root as the word "cultivate," and was initially used by self-designated "civilized" people (who believed they had raised themselves from a "state of nature") to distinguish themselves from the so-called "savages" whom they perceived to be totally devoid of any semblance of self-cultivation. Eventually people (and to their credit, anthropologists were some of the main champions of this revelation) realized that that was a bit of a biased perspective, and started using the term "culture" to refer to the habits and worldviews that seemed to characterize and distinguish ALL people groups.

"Culture" has since been subject to an enormous proliferation of meanings, which are often inconsistent if not wholly contradictory. Some use the term to refer to specific genres of activity such as formalized art, music, and literature, while others understand it to incorporate the whole range of human activity. Some claim that culture consists solely of immaterial components such as symbols, beliefs, and values; others believe that material artifacts are also manifestations of culture. Some speak of Culture with a capital C as something universal to all humanity, while others speak of differentiated small-c cultures, each with its own language, traditions, and other distinguishing characteristics.

While the debate over which is the "true" or "proper" meaning of culture is not one I will make any effort to settle at the moment, there are two definitions of culture I find particularly interesting, which I will be using to frame the various topics I explore in future articles. The first identifies that which is learned or acquired through imitation of others (rather than being independently devised or discovered), and the second involves what Ralph Holloway has called "the imposition of arbitrary form on the environment." (Of course, Holloway constructs this definition in order to assert that humans are the only animals exhibiting culture, a claim by which I am not personally completely convinced, but that is beside the point—for the moment, at least.)

I will delve more deeply into these two definitions, and their implications, in a subsequent article, as I would like for the moment to turn from this tangent back to the subject at hand—namely, my own introduction. But I hope this has provided some helpful background regarding the admittedly slippery term "anthropology," and the even more slippery concept of "culture" (at least enough to tide us over for the moment).

Back to the Anthropologist

As I said, I became an anthropologist long before I had any inkling about the definition of the term. What do I mean by this? For as long as I can remember—and for the archaeologists among my readership, the written record (as preserved in my diaries and other assorted compositions) confirms this claim beginning in January of 1992—I have been fascinated with the patterns of human behavior, the meanings that people attribute to those behaviors, and the ways that beliefs and understandings impact how people interact with one another. I have a habit of carefully observing the world around me, taking note of interesting social phenomena, and formulating theories to explain both the regularities and irregularities I came across.

It was not until after I graduated from college (without taking a single course in anthropology—in fact, it was almost as though fate had intentionally intervened to prevent me from doing so, since the only courses that scheduling reasons ever forced me to drop during my undergraduate career were the two Comparative Sociology classes in which I had enrolled) that I learned that the study of humanity was not merely a fascinating hobby, but a legitimately recognized academic discipline. When I began looking into the matter further and encountered a description of ethnography (the primary research method of the cultural anthropologist, which involves immersing oneself in a particular field site through engaged participant-observation, recording detailed written fieldnotes of one's experiences, and subjecting these notes to subsequent formal analysis), I flipped back through the fifteen volumes of journal entries I had been keeping since second grade and realized I had undergone a full apprenticeship in the process without even realizing it.

Since I was, at the time of this epiphanic revelation, in the process of deciding what sort of graduate program to enroll in, I decided to formalize my obvious anthropological inclinations through academic training. This led me to the University of Chicago's one-year master's program, which provided me with a thorough and rigorous grounding in social science theory in general, and academic anthropology in particular.

Although I relished the challenges the program presented and appreciated the opportunity to see the mode of inquiry I had long been pursuing on my own terms applied in a more official, widely recognized format, upon completion of the program I ultimately realized that my true passion did not lie in conducting theoretical studies and translating them into "academese" for the perusal of a few other experts in some obscure field. Rather, I wanted to continue to examine the anthropology of the everyday—using the methodological tools and theoretical frameworks I had learned through my academic training to gain insights which I could then express in a manner accessible to the general public. It is for this reason, and to this purpose, that I have started this blog.

I believe firmly (for reasons to be discussed at greater length in subsequent articles) that an anthropological perspective can be of both interest and benefit to all people, whether or not they themselves are as anthropologically inclined as I am. Anthropology encourages an open-mindedness increasingly necessary to navigate the modern world of ever-expanding horizons. It probes the underpinnings of the basic patterns and frameworks that shape our lives, revealing the ways that our seemingly freely chosen actions are often shaped and constrained by our own cultural context. Awareness of this process can, I believe, pave the way for increased independence from these controlling influences, allowing us greater control over our personal behaviors and over, not only our individual destinies, but the destiny of humanity as a whole.

I hope you will read on, and give me the opportunity to convince you that becoming an everyday anthropologist can be as rewarding, and ultimately indespensable, as I have found it to be.


*Note: I have intentionally attempted to keep the definitional portions of this article simple and non-technical. If you are interested in more specific or in-depth background on the topics of anthropology and culture, I am happy to point you in the right direction. Feel free to post questions or areas of interest in the comments.