Anthropological Approaches to Comparative Education

THE MAIN FOCUS of this paper is a discussion of the utility of anthropological approaches to the study of comparative education. This is not by any means intended as a full-scale review of the state of the field, but as a discussion of certain aspects of the anthropological perspective which have value for the understanding of processes in education obscured in other kinds of studies, or perhaps not even acknowledged to be worthy of study. Throughout the paper an attempt will be made to underscore the relevance of such a perspective for the study of what educators tend to label educational problems. The four areas to be discussed in detail, with appropriate reference to other work and to some of my own previous research, are as follows. Firstly, I will consider the area of cross-cultural studies of education and socialization in the broadest sense. Secondly, the comparative study of schools as institutions within a particular socio-cultural context will be discussed, with particular reference to education of minority groups, both indigenous and immigrant (in North America). Thirdly, the area of school ethnography will be examined, with a consideration of its possible future uses both crossculturally and within one society. Lastly will be considered the utility of anthropological theory and methodology in studies which are carried out within a basically sociological framework, and the fruitfulness of an interdisciplinary approach in very large scale research studies.!