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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning (or
Education or School)? An Immodest Proposal for an
Integrative Anthropology of Learning Whose Time Has
Finally Come
Susan D. Blum
ABSTRACT This article proposes a twenty-first-century anthropology of learning: comparative, integrating, pow-
erful, speaking truth to power, and engaging in ethnographic, humanistic, and scientific investigation. Such an en-
terprise welcomes a wide variety of methods. An anthropology of learning includes—but distinguishes—education,
socialization, enculturation, and schooling. It encompasses formal, informal, and nonformal learning. It grapples with
definitions of learning and emphasizes that these are part of every human experience. Some learning happens in
schools; only some of the learning matches what is explicitly intended. Sometimes learning is fostered by teaching,
but pedagogy is not always required. Anthropology is an ideal discipline for investigating learning, education, and
schooling—but these topics are not widely known in the field in general. The article proposes three centers of
attention and provides an extended example, the “thirty-million-word gap.” [learning, schooling, education, word
gap]
RESUMEN Este art´
ıculo propone una antropolog´
ıa del aprendizaje del siglo XXI: comparativa, integradora, y
poderosa, que le habla la verdad al poder y comprometida con investigaci ´
on etnogr ´
afica, human´
ıstica y cient´
ıfica.
Tal iniciativa acoge una amplia variedad de m ´
etodos. Una antropolog´
ıa del aprendizaje incluye —pero distingue—
educaci ´
on, socializaci ´
on, enculturaci ´
on e instrucci ´
on. Abarca aprendizaje formal, informal y no formal. Confronta
definiciones de aprendizaje y enfatiza que ´
estas son parte de cada experiencia humana. Alg ´
un aprendizaje ocurre
en escuelas; s ´
olo alg ´
un aprendizaje coincide con lo que est ´
aexpl
´
ıcitamente dise ˜
nado. Algunas veces el aprendizaje
se estimula con la ense ˜
nanza, pero la pedagog´
ıa no es siempre requerida. La antropolog´
ıa es una disciplina ideal
para investigar sobre aprendizaje, educaci ´
on e instrucci ´
on —pero estos t ´
opicos no son ampliamente conocidos en
el campo en general. Este art´
ıculo propone tres centros de atenci ´
on y provee un ejemplo extendido, el “vac´
ıo de
treinta millones de palabras.” [aprendizaje, instrucci ´
on, educaci ´
on, vac´
ıo de palabras]
ddd ,,,,
d,dd,,
,ddddddd
,d,dd
ddd,“dd”d[d:d
]
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–14, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C
2019 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13268
2American Anthropologist •Vol. 000, No. 0 •xxxx 2019
Learning and teaching are fundamental, implicitly or explicitly,
to human adaptation, socialization, culture change, and, at the
broadest level, the production and reproduction of culture and
society.
– Catherine Pelissier, “The Anthropology of Teaching and Learn-
ing” (1991, 75)
Focal topics in academia wax and wane. Some probably
should wane—totemism, for instance, or phrenology.
Some should wax—anthropology of policy, or intersection-
ality. It is time, I believe, for an anthropology of learning to
wax. The mere existence of a topic is obviously an insuffi-
cient reason to call for increased attention to it; I’ll attempt
to make the case that not only are learning, education, and
schooling (LES) right before us but that they are central
to understanding humans, worthy of sustained and multi-
faceted analysis, and in urgent need of conversation across
specialties.
Remember when food anthropology was seen as trivial
and needed defending? Or the study of childhood? Or focus
on the body? It’s hard to imagine now, but these were initially
ignored, or at least isolated, then became the hottest things,
and have become commonplace—until the posthuman turn,
after the ontological turn, and then the next, and the next
(affect, money, aging, and so on).
Take food anthropology: Food was seen as so obvious,
so ubiquitous, it was as if there was nothing to say about
it. Besides, before the 1980s it had been mostly women,
pioneers like Audrey Richards and Mary Douglas, who had
written about it. Exceptions were the agriculture-focused
and development anthropologists looking at food produc-
tion, but the field celebrates theorists. Despite every tra-
ditional ethnography including a chapter on “subsistence,”
interest was not mainstream. In 1977, Chang wrote that
“the studies of kinship, government, economy, and reli-
gion have [theoretical and methodological] frameworks. The
studies of food . . . do not have them” (4). How things
change!
Childhood studies is similar. In 2002, in these pages,
Hirschfeld wrote, as I do now, half seriously, “Why
Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?” Clearly, numerous
anthropologists—most famously Mead—had written about
them, but “mainstream” anthropologists, Hirschfeld noted,
failed to attend to children’s agency, to children’s lives hav-
ing merit on their own and shaping cultural forms. Children,
he pointed out, are “expert[s] at learning” (616). No one can
fail to note that the anthropological study of childhood has
thrived.
In 1987, Scheper-Hughes and Lock published their pow-
erful “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work
in Medical Anthropology,” which intended to bring anthro-
pological topics into discussion of the body, in the process
defining “an important domain for anthropological inquiry.”
They specified three aims: “introduc[ing] general anthropol-
ogists to the potential contributions of medical anthropology
toward understanding an intellectual domain we all share
—the body”; “draw[ing] the attention of medical anthropol-
ogists to writings on the body not usually recognized for
their relevance to the field”; and “speak[ing] to clinicians
and other health practitioners who daily minister to mindful
bodies” (7). By any measure, they have succeeded.
Substitute “learning” for “the body,” “educational an-
thropologists” for “medical anthropologists,” and “educators”
for “clinicians,” and my goals bear an uncanny resemblance
to theirs, though I focus principally on their first aim: to per-
suade “general anthropologists” to attend to a “domain we all
share.” Like with the body, plentiful writings about LES ex-
ist without necessarily being recognized in the broader field
(with some exceptions, like Willis [1977] or Bourdieu and
Passeron [(1970) 1990]). This isolation is enduring; Spindler
and Spindler reflected back in 1983 that “we [anthropolo-
gists of education] not only talk mostly to ourselves; we do
not talk much to anthropologists nor to professional edu-
cators” (1983, 76). Declining to speculate on the reasons,
they lament: “We think there is a pervasive prejudice against
education within anthropology” (76).1
Two decades ago, here in American Anthropologist, Levin-
son (1999) attempted to drum up enthusiasm for a critical
“educational discourse in anthropology,” showing that cul-
tural studies and focus on media as influence were incom-
plete without at least some attention to schools. (Though the
article is well regarded, AnthroSource counts only twenty-
four citations; Scheper-Hughes and Lock [1987] has 2784.)
Levinson was in part picking up on Bourgois’s (1996) then-
recent charge that many anthropologists’ focus on classroom
ethnography lacked consideration of other ways people—
especially the “inner-city” youth he studied—are educated,
even outside of schools, about schools and broader political
and economic factors (the learning could in some sense be
negative [personal communication, Brandon Moskun]).
Continuing the thread, Varenne (2007, 1565) lamented
“the scarcity of conversations within the discipline about
education as a fundamental human activity.” Just two years
ago, Gusterson (2017) urged us to do our “homework,”
noting in American Ethnologist the lack of systematic study of
universities.
It’s not that a focus on learning or schools is nonexistent;
it’s just largely unknown outside the circle of specialists. For
example, Lancy, Bock, and Gaskins edited a strong col-
lection in 2010, The Anthropology of Learning in Childhood.
Most of the eighteen chapters investigate general dimen-
sions of learning, and one (Lancy 2010a) concerned schools.
This book has been cited, according to Google Scholar, a
respectable ninety-one times. (Compare, say, Counihan’s
[1999] The Anthropology of Food and Body, cited 821 times,
but also Mascia-Lee’s [2011] Companion to the Anthropology of
the Body and Embodiment, cited eighty-seven times.) Similarly,
the work of Jean Lave, perhaps one of the most prominent
anthropologists of learning, is well known; her 1991 book
Situated Learning, with Etienne Wenger, has been cited more
than 65,000 times according to Google Scholar. Cognition in
Blum •Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning? 3
Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Culture in Everyday Life (Lave
1988) has been cited more than 11,000 times, and Everyday
Cognition: Its Development in Social Context (Rogoff and Lave
1984) almost 2,000 times. Even her article “The Practice
of Learning” (Lave 1993) has been cited more than 2,000
times. Yet in American Anthropologist, there have been only
nineteen citations of Lave at all since 2000 (plus a book
review) and fifteen before.
What really inspired this article, however, is a recent
comment from a well-intentioned colleague. I was talking
about the ways subjectivities are shaped by the experience of
being in school, and this colleague found it fascinating and,
even better, believed that “it would be applicable outside of
just school.”
Just School.
So, inspired by three articles (Gusterson 2017;
Hirschfeld 2002; Levinson 1999), informed by other syn-
thetic pieces (Delamont 2012; Pelissier 1991; Wortham
2008; Yon 2003) and the long line of frustrated anthropolo-
gists arguing, for half a century, for its importance (Erikson
1982; Spindler and Spindler 1983; Varenne 2007; Wolcott
1982, 2011), and modeled somewhat on Scheper-Hughes
and Lock’s (1987) piece, I ask, “Why Don’t Anthropologists
Care about Learning (or Education or Schools)?”
I aim, ultimately, to propose a new and powerful an-
thropology of learning. I regard learning as the most inclusive
of the three terms, because it encompasses formal, informal,
and nonformal ways of being formed, shaped, and changed
(see below for more discussion of these terms). It also em-
phasizes learners as agents and experiencers rather than the
outside forces acting on them. The anthropology of learning
is broad enough to encompass studies of both deliberate ed-
ucation and inadvertent acquisition of knowledge or skills,
learning attempted and learning failed, learning embraced
and learning resisted, learning inside schools and learning
outside of schools, learning in childhood and after, learning
across societies, and learning by humans and by nonhumans.
This is far from new (see, e.g., Lave 1982), but it has not
yet “taken.”2Despite Bateson’s (1972, 279) claim that “all
species of behavioral scientists are concerned with ‘learning’
in one sense or another of that word,” anthropologists have
only sometimes picked up that baton. I do not dictate a single
desirable theoretical or methodological approach, nor do I
necessarily wish to show that generalizable “theory” emerges
from research on learning. I wish only to call attention, to
dwell for a time with the topic and show its importance.
Like with our field’s engagement from countless perspec-
tives with the topic of race, we can benefit from common
conversations and influence from each other’s insights. But
that means the topic has to become “mainstream.”
So, is it true that most anthropologists don’t care about
learning? Why don’t they?
Well, some do. But mainstream anthropologists, or
what Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) called “general” an-
thropologists, don’t.
So please allow me to introduce this topic.
LACK OF ATTENTION TO LEARNING IN
MAINSTREAM ANTHROPOLOGY
Though we could spend years debating a definition of “main-
stream anthropology,” I follow Hirschfeld in simply count-
ing how many articles in top anthropology locations fo-
cus on learning, education, or schools (LES). With the ex-
ception of specialist publications on education or research
on language socialization and childhood studies in linguis-
tic/psychological anthropology, LES is largely underrepre-
sented. (In legal and political anthropology, schools as in-
stitutions within which youth and citizens are shaped have a
place.)
Below is the outcome of a reading of the table of con-
tents of the fifteen most recent issues of prominent anthro-
pology journals (with varying numbers of annual issues)—
excluding language socialization and childhood. This is far
from straightforward, and I didn’t read every article; I may
have missed some items. I also examined several recent
textbooks.
rAmerican Anthropologist, with a confusing total number
of items (articles, comments, responses), had 6 arti-
cles focusing on LES, of which 4 concerned teaching
anthropology; 12 out of 528 book reviews were of
books on LES. This occurred under different editors.
◦A reviewer asked how this might have changed over
time. I looked at the four issues each from 2008,
1998, 1988, and 1978. In 2008, I found 1 article
and 4 reviews out of 139; in 1998, 2 articles and
1 review out of 209; in 1988, no articles and 5
reviews (including “initiation”) out of 323; in 1978,
no articles and 3 reviews (including “enculturation”
and “socialization”) out of 329.3
rCurrent Anthropology, which also changed editors, had
4 articles on these topics, and had 3 reviews out of
77 total. (Thematic supplements were excluded.)
rCultural Anthropology had no articles until its magnif-
icent 2018 forum on academic precarity. Out of 48
“themes,” “knowledge practices” might be relevant,
as might “youth.” The most recent relevant article
on “knowledge practices” was on children’s summer
camp, published in 1992.
rAmerican Ethnologist similarly had a change in editor
over the period, with 6 relevant articles, and 5 re-
views out of a total of 395.
rAnnual Review of Anthropology had 7 relevant articles
out of a total of 378.
rIn a convenience sample of 7 textbooks (2017–
2019)—5 four-field, 2 cultural anthropology—there
were 2 mentions of school, 8 pages on education (all
but 1 in a single book), and 22 pages on “learning,”
which included “social learning,” mostly among non-
human primates or as definitive of humans, who have
to “learn culture.” One four-field text mentioned
none of these three terms.
4American Anthropologist •Vol. 000, No. 0 •xxxx 2019
Had I checked a different set of journals (Journal of Lin-
guistic Anthropology,Ethos,Anthropology & Education Quarterly,
Human Organization,Brain and Behavioral Sciences,Human De-
velopment,Cognition), I would surely have found many more
relevant articles, but they are not “mainstream” anthropol-
ogy journals.
REASONS WHY
Following my three predecessors, I speculate briefly on why
this disregard may exist, or as Levinson (1999, 597) terms it,
gently, “Some Explanations for the Relative Neglect,” many
of which have gone unchanged in two decades.
Anthropologists may have an aversion to studying these
topics for several reasons. Analysis of our own situations
may be threatening to anthropologists as teachers, employ-
ees, and even parents; many work in schools and many have
children in schools. Our fieldwork and funding often rely
on sponsoring academic institutions and colleagues; per-
haps we fear public scrutiny and embarrassment (Gusterson
2017, 436). Gusterson (2017, 435; quoting Strathern 2000)
attributes the lack of attention to the study of universities and
higher education to a potential “avoidance relationship”—
even in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, which focuses
largely on K–12 schools. Once something familiar becomes
strange, we must question it. Seeing the strangeness of
schooling practices may force us to examine our own ped-
agogical tactics, which we largely emulate from our own
apprenticeship in schools.
It is also possible that teaching as an activity connected
with LES may be regarded as trivial or obvious in academia,
where metrics focus largely on scholarly production. In the
United States, schools of education have been perennially
disparaged (Labaree 2008) and teachers have been disre-
spected. Teaching programs such as Teach for America are
often seen as superior to university-based teacher training,
which is disdained as intellectually mediocre (personal com-
munication, anonymous reviewer). Anthropologists housed
in schools of education may be evaluated by activity in jour-
nals, conferences, and research programs outside the dis-
cipline. Despite the decades of strenuous work on gender,
both schooling and education may be largely associated with
women, as are food, children, the body (Ortner 1972), and
emotion (Lutz 1988). Levinson mentioned this as possible in
a footnote; Hirschfeld also considers it.
Anthropologists outside the circle of educational anthro-
pologists may find the theories used by the latter somewhat
outdated, diverging from theoretically sophisticated devel-
opments of the field as a whole and relying on old meth-
ods and theory (Delamont 2012) or employing essentialized
notions of identity that the discipline has repudiated in fa-
vor of more “sophisticated ways” of studying diversity (per-
sonal communication, anonymous reviewer). Many class-
room ethnographies, although essential, are relatively small-
bore, with close, detailed description. Moreover, carefully
constructed studies of “learning” within laboratory or exper-
imental settings may appear antiseptic, divorced from the
messy realities of the world and often neglecting considera-
tions of power or context.
Despite calls for anthropologists to “engage” the world,
there is enduring preference for theory over practice.
WHY ANTHROPOLOGISTS SHOULD CARE
There are many reasons why learning, education, and school-
ing might attract the attention of our field more broadly.
Clearly, all humans must learn; in fact, this is often stated as
the defining feature of humankind, as we are born with few
instincts, instead needing “cultural transmission” (the termi-
nology varies). Sometimes—and now often—this learning
occurs in schools.
Schools have become ubiquitous, yet people in the con-
temporary world do not go to school in identical ways or
contexts. If people do not attend school in a world where it
is seen as desirable, for instance, the reasons for their lack
of attendance should be studied, as should how else learning
occurs.
Additionally, formal education occupies a substantial
and central amount of time in the lives of virtually every-
one in the contemporary world, in the Global North or
South. (Whether the structural similarities are sufficient to
make school the same globally is a pressing research question
[Anderson-Levitt 2005].) According to the United Nations,
91 percent of children aged six to eleven worldwide are in
school (UNICEF 2018).4How much they learn is another
genuine question, but the time devoted is substantial.
In the United States, students who start in kindergarten
and finish four years of college—the middle-class ideal in the
United States and many other countries, as well as of devel-
opment organizations—spend approximately 20,000 hours
in classes. That does not include homework, after-school
activities, or social relations emergent through living within
this total institution. It does not count tutoring, summer
classes, or parental discussions about school. And US school
hours are relatively short; South Korean children attend
school from seven in the morning until ten at night, and
laws had to be established to prevent students from partic-
ipating in supplementary classes after curfew (Seth 2002).
Some people use blackout curtains to avoid roaming enforce-
ment guards. (In the United States, truant officers enforce
attendance.)
Formal education also commands enormous resources.
Materially, according to Caplan (2018), a libertarian-
oriented economist writing against schools, institutional edu-
cation is a bigger sector of the US economy than the military,
when public and private funding of schools at all levels are
combined. As societies’ affluence increases, they “consume”
greater amounts of schooling. (Students under neoliberal-
ism are trained to see themselves as consumers rather than as
citizens.) Global measures of well-being and development—
which anthropologists should challenge—note percentages
of GDP spent on education and rates of school attendance.
Most nation-states spend between 2 and 6 percent of their
GDP on formal schooling; one measure has the United States
Blum •Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning? 5
at 7.3 percent (Associated Press 2013). Advantaged indi-
viduals aiming to position themselves above others spend
additionally on private tutoring and other forms of cultural
capital.
If learning is defined, as is usual by psychologists, such as
Cherry (2019), as “a relatively permanent change in behavior
as a result of experience,” then this applies to essentially every
anthropological inquiry, and in time we may regard studies
without mention of learning as incomplete.
TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF LEARNING
Given at least these reasons, I propose a new twenty-first-
century anthropology of learning: comparative, integrat-
ing, and powerful, and that speaks truth to power and
engages in ethnographic, scientific, and humanistic inves-
tigation. I envision such an enterprise using a wide vari-
ety of methods and theories. An anthropology of learn-
ing would include—but distinguish—education, socializa-
tion, enculturation, schooling, transmission, and other such
terms. It would encompass formal, informal, and nonformal
learning—topics usually studied separately.
In addition to the reasons given earlier, I regard learning
as the umbrella term because education is often ambiguous,
both synonymous with school and also including the ways
humans are formed as citizens or as youth. Some contrast,
on the one hand, education as the familiar school forms
involving a curriculum, passivity, and reliance on extrinsic
motivation, and on the other, learning as involving curios-
ity, active engagement, and focus on intrinsic motivation
(Holmen 2014). While destabilizing the assumed centrality
of schools as the principal site for learning, even a contrast
between formal, informal, and nonformal learning takes
school as the unmarked norm. Though these terms are used
inconsistently (Bekerman, Burbules, and Silberman-Keller
2006), they are roughly distinguished as follows:
rFormal learning is the familiar school-centered learn-
ing, occurring with deliberate, intentional planning,
often with guidance and a set of predefined goals.
It can also encompass apprenticeship, preparation
for rites of passage, or other socially recognized se-
quences and curricula. (Is the “chore curriculum”
[Lancy 2015] a true curriculum? How is it the same
as and how does it differ from school curricula?)
rInformal learning occurs in settings outside schools
and often without the pressure of evaluation but
nonetheless may be structured and guided, as in mu-
sic lessons or museum excursions, Little League, and
the like (Heath 2012).
rNonformal learning is all the rest—things learned in
the course of life without deliberate intention.
I believe that schools—prominent and formative as they
are—could fruitfully be studied in conversation with other
studies of learning.
Children, but not only children, must learn—and not
only in school. Any new endeavor—new job, new commu-
nity, new language, new hobby, new food, new music, new
repair, new country, new community of practice (Wenger
1998)—requires learning but also choices.
From whom do people learn in each setting?
Do people learn from parents, peers or near-peers,
teachers, siblings or other kin, television, advertising,
coworkers, children, adults? From YouTube stars? Insta-
gram influencers? What from each?
What are the processes? The motives? The outcomes?
(Learning “perfectly” is hard, as every teacher knows. As-
suming flawless and identical reproduction is ideological.)
It doesn’t just happen that children reproduce their elders’
ways or that elders seamlessly “transmit” cultural practices
as we can now share digital files at a distance. For human
beings, there is a process of “sharing,” and it varies. It seems to
me that our field is the perfect one to speak authoritatively
about what happens.
What are the shaping factors? The support and the ob-
stacles? Resistance? How is a particular instance liberatory
and how does it perpetuate inequalities?
Where does the learning occur? Some learning happens
in schools. In the wider society, people learn about the
place of schools and what is supposed to happen in them
(Bourgois 1996). They learn how people discuss them—
charter schools, no-excuses academies, expeditionary
schools—and how they are funded. They learn about “good
schools” in “good neighborhoods” and about admission re-
quirements and payment for desirable schools and colleges.
In addition to schools, learning also occurs outside of
school, sometimes deliberately as people and societies invest
in voluntary, informal learning—everything from ancestry
to maker spaces to Zen meditation. Aiming to remedy fail-
ures of schooling, “place-based learning” has been seen as a
solution as it fosters emotional attachment to settings and
contexts while also accomplishing preset curricular aims.
Learning also occurs in households and houses of worship
and at work.
We could discuss what is learned. Attention is often
directed at the explicit curricular aims, yet we know that
the intended learning often fails to occur in school (Arum
and Roksa 2011). Only some of the learning matches what
is explicitly intended. Education may “backfire,” at least
according to the plans of those who arrange it, but something
is always learned.
Students in schools learn to master—or mimic mastery
of—class content, and they learn about social interaction,
about power, about expectations of their teachers and their
classmates. They learn about their own desires, whether hon-
ored or suppressed. They learn bodily hexis from the physical
arrangement of the environment (chairs and tables, metal
detectors, bean-bag chairs, windows, playgrounds, cafete-
rias, locker rooms, lockdowns, bathroom passes, dorms,
bars), and they learn performance from evaluations (grades,
approval, invitations for further participation, test scores,
6American Anthropologist •Vol. 000, No. 0 •xxxx 2019
promotion, tracks, inclusion/exclusion, credentials). They
learn to game the system, to cheat, to pretend (Blum 2009).
They learn to cope with bullying and shaming, and they learn
what things are done in school and what happens outside of
school. They learn about hierarchy and control.
For example, if people learn to cook, they learn—often
without direct instruction—where food is procured, even if
they are uninvolved in producing it, who procures it, what
items are ordinary and what are marked, how the economics
work and how their own household is situated with regard
to desirable foods, who prepares which kinds of foods, and
when food is procured, prepared, and eaten. They learn
about measurement and storage and recipes and preparation,
about consumption and utensils, and occasions and sharing
or not sharing. They learn about bodily capabilities and
limitations in the context of physical, social, economic, and
interpersonal environments.
An anthropology of learning could focus on obvious but
important issues of “content”: evolution textbooks fought
over in Texas, East Asian history textbooks (“comfort
women,” the Nanjing massacre, the Tiananmen massacre)
leading to riots and foreign policy disputes, ethnic studies
outlawed in Arizona, trigger warnings lampooned in the US
press, periodic reviews of curricular requirements, and dis-
cussion of “the canon” at almost every institution of higher
education—and in anthropology. How do disagreements
over school content intersect with particular forms of na-
tionalism, racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism?
An anthropology of learning could provide some of the con-
texts and nuances of issues frequently in the news: disparag-
ing of “snowflakes” and calls to limit screen time. Studies
of cyberbullying might be connected to Hirschfeld’s (2002)
study of “cooties,” in turn resembling the lore detailed in
Opie and Opie’s ([1959] 2000) lifelong work on schoolyard
folklore. How does age-grading and how do total institu-
tions not only reflect but also affect other social aspects of
experience?
We might investigate the effects of learning. In school,
along with learning arithmetic, students also learn to respond
to adults with power: which children get more approval than
others, how to postpone trips to the bathroom, and which
one, how to talk and whose talk is seen as needing correc-
tion, and how to position their bodies in furniture, in chairs,
in rooms, in buildings, and in relation to others. Students
observe who is or isn’t in the room. They learn about time
and recordkeeping, about age-grading and the way the lifes-
pan is organized, and about separation of inside and outside.
Students may be medicated to ensure better fit with the
environment or require psychotherapy to cope with the dis-
tresses of the experience. In neoliberal settings, some win
and others lose—by design (Labaree 2010; Varenne and
McDermott 1998).
We might investigate how the learning occurs. People
learn from texts and pictures and talk. They learn through
direct instruction and from inadvertent participation. Some-
times learning is fostered by teaching, but pedagogy is not
always required (see Lancy 2010b; pace Kline 2015). They
learn from lectures and reading, from demonstrations and
labs, from trial and error, and from observation.
We might investigate the learning of our species. It is not
only humans, of course, who learn. All animals do, and there
is evidence that even plants “learn” (adapt to ongoing cir-
cumstances; Gagliano et al. 2016). Anthropologists should
weigh in on this sine qua non of life, possibly increasing our
interactions with colleagues who work on topics beyond the
human.
All these topics could benefit from anthropological
attention.
POTENTIAL CENTERS OF ATTENTION
There are countless ways we could slice up research on
learning and countless ways we could draw connections. For
convenience, I’ve divided up coverage of existing research
on learning into three “centers of attention.” Any study could
profit from additional perspectives from the others.
Political Economy, Labor, Neoliberalism, and Justice
Research in this center of attention is focused on schools
as institutions with power and unequal distribution of re-
sources. Given the ubiquity of schools in the contemporary
world, much research has been conducted on their polit-
ical economic practices; on labor, funding, and political
equality; on arguments about their purposes; and on the
organization of knowledge and institutional hegemony. It is
here that much of the Council on Anthropology and Edu-
cation, founded in 1968, concentrates its efforts. The CAE
defines its mission as “to advance anti-oppressive, socially eq-
uitable, and racially just solutions to educational problems
through research using anthropological perspectives, theo-
ries, methods, and findings.” In order to achieve that mission,
it advocates research “responsive to oppressed groups” and
that “promotes practices that bring anthropologists, scholars
from other disciplines, and educators together to promote
racial and social justice in all settings where learning takes
place.” Despite explicitly stating that it was founded “to
advance scholarship on schooling in social and cultural con-
texts, and on human learning both inside and outside of
schools,” the bulk of its efforts are inside schools.
In this broad category of political economy, labor, ne-
oliberalism, and justice we could place Levinson et al.’s
(2011) compilation Beyond Critique: Exploring Critical Social
Theories and Education (classified on the back cover under “Ed-
ucation/Sociology”), which is focused on schools, though
referring to “education.” Levinson writes that “all social
practice, including the practice of education or educational
research, is deeply informed by interests and value commit-
ments that have political consequences” (14), but also that
“looking at education helps illuminate how society more
generally works” (15). One of the enduring mysteries of
social life is how inequalities become embodied; this work
can show its daily reinforcement. Here, an explicitly “crit-
ical” view argues for emancipation, equality, access, and
Blum •Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning? 7
respect (Freire [1970] 2000). Schools’ roles in perpetuating
racism and other forms of inequality have been well, and jus-
tifiably, investigated (Rosa 2019). This center of attention
includes access to school in general, attention to what occurs
in terms of content and structure and relationships. Some
of the linguistic anthropology of education (e.g., Wortham
2004) details how race, gender, class, sexuality, national
origin, and (dis-)ability play out in everyday classroom in-
teractions. Gusterson’s (2017) argument for increased at-
tention to higher education lies largely within this center, as
well.
School funding—taxes and tuition—intersects with the
anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, institutions, and
policy, all profoundly connected to the nature of the polity.
Anthropologists might analyze views of taxes, public (“gov-
ernment schools”) and private schools, charter schools,
neighborhood schools, vouchers, religious versus secular
schools (Moore 2008), grants, loans and debt, and profit
across societies to make evident the sometimes-shared and
sometimes-distinct dimensions of schools worldwide.
International development agencies are deeply involved
with schooling. The Human Development Index of the
United Nations includes three broad measures: life ex-
pectancy, GDP, and education (which recognizes only for-
mal schooling). Since 2010, the education index measures
adult mean years of schooling against children’s expected
years of schooling, seen as contributing to “knowledge.”5
In this category, we could find information about the status
of schooling—and its effects, not always salutary—in var-
ious countries, such as in Bolten’s (2015) work on Sierra
Leone.
It is not incidental that schools present, in some con-
texts, powerful threats to entrenched interests. Malala
Yousafzai was attacked for going to school, and suicide
bombings in Afghanistan in 2018 targeted the Department of
Education.6Battles over school boards in the United States
are fierce. What do these struggles reveal? Why schools?
Under neoliberalism’s entrenched grip, anthropologists
have written about academic labor, especially in the con-
text of adjunctification, casualization, and the precariat, or
the work “speedup” experienced by faculty and students
alike (Duclos, S´
anchez Criado, and Nguyen 2017; Platzer
and Allison 2018). Anthropologists have addressed faculty
evaluation, metrics, and assessments (Merry 2011; Shore
and Wright 2015; Strathern 2000), paying less attention to
student performance evaluation (but see Blum 2017a, forth-
coming; Varenne 1974). This is connected with notions of
competition and ranking, and the eclipsing of a notion of cit-
izenship (Giroux 2002; Varenne and McDermott 1998).
Here, the anthropology of work and economic anthro-
pology are relevant: students and institutions are engaged
in constant tasks of positioning (Gershon 2017; Urciuoli
2014).
Much of the work done in this center could profit from
greater engagement with work I’m placing in the other
centers.
Subjectivities
Human subjectivities are formed within intimate kin set-
tings but also through interactions with institutions such
as schools. “Socialization” has been much studied by an-
thropologists, such as Ochs and Taylor’s (1992) analysis of
dinner-table socialization, which teaches children how to
act in a family as occupants of certain positionalities. Alli-
son (1991) has skillfully employed Althusser’s concept of
ideological state apparatus in her analysis of the consump-
tion and preparation of children’s lunch boxes in Japanese
schools and how these shape both mothers’ and children’s
proper behavior. The rich literature on formation and tech-
nologies of selfhood, especially in Europe and the United
States (Elias [1939] 2000; Foucault 1988; Rose 1990), some-
times includes schools, where we find not only reproduction
(Bourdieu and Passeron [1970] 1990) but also resistance
(Willis 1977) and differentiated embrace of school values
(Eckert 1989; Wortham 2008), but these two bodies of
analysis are largely separate (but see Levinson, Foley, and
Holland 1996).
Here, social interaction analyses—whether from eth-
nomethodology and conversation analysis or from more
conventional ethnographic close description, phenomeno-
logical accounts, and narratives—address the question of
how subjectivities are formed. Such inquiries must include
the formative period of childhood but also beyond that time,
including when people change settings, such as in migration.
The experience of schooling is formative, whether stu-
dents embrace the values of schooling (organization, effi-
ciency, and speed; focus on credentials and external mea-
sures; the separation of learning into artificial disciplines) or
reject it (dropping out, being judged a “failure” [Bourgois
1996]), and whether they are successful, mediocre, or in-
adequate by the school’s measures. People in the United
States have nightmares about school for years, and this is
true of both successful and failing students—but is that the
case everywhere?
Schools reflect but also influence social practices outside
them. The very closing-off process of schools as total insti-
tutions (Goffman 1961) is a cultural, not inherent or ubiq-
uitous, process, as is narrow age-grading (Chudacoff 1989).
Much learning “in real life” happens completely intertwined
with that life, not in separate locations, but modernity has
attempted to break learning down according to Fordist scien-
tific management principles, which affects not only learning
but also the experience of living.
Many ethnographies of school, which often but not al-
ways include classroom ethnographies, show the interan-
imation of school and life outside, as (usually) children
are being formed to become members of their societies
with the proper—rewarded—responses, actions, affects,
and attitudes (Bernstein 1971; Eckert 1989; McLaren 1999;
Varenne and McDermott 1998; Willis 1977). For example,
Preschool in Three Cultures (Tobin, Wu, and Davidson 1989;
Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa 2009) shows how preschools
reflect their historical and geographical contexts. Cultural
8American Anthropologist •Vol. 000, No. 0 •xxxx 2019
specificity is evident through comments by both insiders and
outsiders to videos of classroom practices. US and Chinese
teachers were shocked, for instance, when Japanese teach-
ers “failed” to “discipline” one boy for apparent bullying
behavior. The Japanese teachers explained their deliberate
decision not to intervene through their conviction that group
identification and group response should outweigh student–
teacher relationships. US and Chinese teachers believed this
was indefensible. In Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and
Person in an American Junior High School (2007), Korean an-
thropologist Jung observes the ways Kansas students’ bodies
and spirits are shaped by and reflect broader cultural expec-
tations of individuality and emotional regulation, exemplary
of the ways “micro” and “macro” forces may—and I would
argue, must—be put into conversation.
The topic of subjectivity extends well into the college
populations with which academic anthropologists usually in-
teract. Highly selective colleges and universities influence
national conversations and the political and intellectual for-
mation of leaders and intellectuals, though large state univer-
sities and community colleges educate the majority of the US
college population. Only a handful of anthropologists (and
some ethnographic sociologists) have touched these settings
(Blum 2009, 2016; Holland and Eisenhart 1990; LaDousa
2011; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005; Urciuoli 2014; Wade
2017). Bregnbæk (2016) shows how the individualist orien-
tation of modern schooling may conflict with filial obligations
in China and therefore produce suffering and even suicidal
college students. Gershon’s (2017) analysis of “branding”
as a technology of the self shows students and job seekers
learning to present themselves as a business or a brand or
to think of themselves as the “CEO of me.” The neoliberal
dimensions of college appear so obvious and natural (com-
monsense) that when I tried to engage my own students in
analyzing them, they couldn’t see what needed discussion,
so hegemonic is this structure. Why, they seemed to accuse,
did Inot understand that college is competitive, through and
through?
The formation of selfhood, subjectivity, and habitus are
usually treated as separate from learning (but see Giroux
2002) and by completely different practitioners.
Human Nature(s), Learning Per Se
It is a truism that humans are born helpless, with few “in-
stincts.” (Humans are also, arguably, born “cultural,” given
uterine sensation of mother’s language, movements, and
food.) Yet by adulthood they all, barring disabilities or so-
cial pathologies, such as deprivation or isolation, become
fully competent, though not identical. How exactly does
this happen? Such “becoming cultural” does not occur with
the ingestion of a pill, nor like printing a photo from a neg-
ative (Hirschfeld 2002). How, exactly, do humans learn?
How do these humans, as opposed to those humans, learn?
Howdosomenot learn, refuse to learn, learn partially and
selectively? We don’t learn everything from everybody. We
choose, actively, which people are to be our models—and
we create variations, as one generation changes its practices
from those preceding.
Anthropologists concerned with human evolution have
written extensively about the evolution of learning (in con-
trast to instinct, and including language; Bock 2010) and
wisdom (Deane-Drummond and Fuentes 2017); some re-
cent work hypothesizes the evolution of teaching and peda-
gogy (G¨
ardenfors and H¨
ogberg 2017; Kline 2015; Sterelny
2012). A question has arisen about “natural pedagogy”
(Csibra and Gergely 2009) and whether direct, explicit,
or verbal instruction is necessary, or whether trial and error
or observation are adequate.
What are the ranges of approaches, beyond WEIRD set-
tings (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010)—the West-
ern, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies
usually studied in psychological research (Gaskins 2008;
Greenfield 2004; Lancy 1980; Lave 1988; Paradise 1998)?
What affordances? Are they effective? Lancy (1980, 2010b)
has questioned the need for teaching and shown how reliance
on being taught may cause WEIRD learners to develop a kind
of dependence that learners in other settings don’t share.
Though some anthropologists, such as Ingold (2000) on en-
skillment, aim to understand more general human needs and
affordance, this work is rarely invoked by anthropologists of
school or education.
“The learning sciences,” which rarely look outside
WEIRD settings, often omit anthropology.7Out of the fif-
teen chapters of the neuroanthropology collection The Encul-
tured Brain (Lende and Downey 2012), only three mention
“learning,” though not school or education; mostly “encul-
turation” is assumed to occur (but see Downey 2005, 2012).
But how? The process of enculturing,orlearning, could be
added, along with its social dimensions (Gowlland 2018).
Cognitive science and neuroscience have been actively
involved in the study of schooling and teaching, focused
on cognitive learning of content and skills. Intersection is
possible—and necessary—here among biological, psycho-
logical, cultural, political, and medical anthropology. The
question of what it is to be “neurotypical” or to have disabil-
ities (for example, in reading) is anthropological. Dyslexia
intersects with the multiple forms of literacies that linguis-
tic and cultural anthropologists detail. Heath (1983) offers
important ethnographic data about the nature of a variety of
“literacy events”; Street and others (Gee 2015) have shown
that notions of literacy—literacies—are ideological and so-
ciocultural, not simply individual and cognitive, in New
Literacy Studies.
Work on learning and apprenticeship shows how well
people learn outside formal factory models of education
(Coy 1989; Gaskins 2008; Greenfield 2004; Herzog 2008;
Paradise 1998; Rogoff 1990, 2011) and how knowledge, or
“know-how,” is distributed, as Gladwin (1970), Hutchins
(1995), and Lave and Wenger (1991) have done with Xerox
repairmen and navigators, or people in institutions, such as
the Navy. Carr’s (2010) excellent Annual Review of Anthro-
pology article, “Enactments of Expertise,” engages with this,
Blum •Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning? 9
though “learning” is not one of the keywords; “apprentice-
ship” alone occurs. I believe that abstracting up a level would
facilitate comparison.
With school the dominant model for learning, people
might assume that learning requires “lesson plans,” “learn-
ing goals,” and a curriculum. But people also learn from
signs that are “given off,” producing many types of non-
explicit and nonreferential information. The concept of
the “hidden curriculum” recognizes that, in schools, judg-
ment is transmitted alongside content, power, agency, or
passivity. Students don’t always want to learn what oth-
ers want to transmit (Kohl 1994). What are the rela-
tionships that foster smooth transmission or foster inter-
ruption, rupture? Where is resistance seen? What are its
effects?
Research on college tends to emphasize the social and
psychological on residential campuses (Bregnbæk 2016;
Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005).
Few in higher education research discuss learning in an an-
thropological way (Blum 2016), though Chumley (2016)
writes about the paradoxical goal of teaching creativity.
Hasse’s (2015) magnificent An Anthropology of Learning em-
ploys feminist and STS theories to understand how anthro-
pologists learn through ethnography; she nonetheless does
not engage at all with educational anthropology.
Applications, Advocacy, Engagement
These three foci—and I invite others to “slice the pie”
differently—have obvious application, whether at the pol-
icy level or in constructing learning environments (if at all).
Topics from teaching to disability studies to questions about
technology and media to the anthropology of sport and pol-
icy of all sorts rely on an understanding of learning, but often
without explicit theorizing. One of the most obvious appli-
cations of this knowledge is in our own classrooms (Blum
2017a, forthcoming)—though only a small subset of an-
thropologists of learning have touched pedagogy. Research
on democratic, feminist, anarchic pedagogy, and pedagogy
for freedom can be useful for those wishing to challenge
the dominance of industrial management, with its analo-
gous “learning outcomes” and coercive attempts to manip-
ulate students into aligning with faculty-determined moti-
vation. As I aim to implement such approaches in my own
classrooms, finding that “freedom” is sometimes met with
demands for rubrics and more structure, anthropological
analysis of discipline and governmentality helps prevent me
from blaming my individual students for refusing proffered
“resistance.”
Let me give an example of what I have in mind. The
so-called thirty-million-word (or language) gap integrates
the four centers of attention and illustrates the potential
to galvanize a robust multispecialist discussion drawing on
multiple forms of anthropological expertise and connections
to multiple fields outside our discipline, all with real-world
effects.
AN EXAMPLE: THE SO-CALLED
THIRTY-MILLION-WORD GAP
In 2012–2013, the local government in Providence, Rhode
Island, announced that its “Providence Talks” program had
won the Bloomberg Philanthropies contest. One of many
such programs, it was an “intervention” attempting to reduce
the “achievement gap” by focusing on “the thirty-million-
word gap”—based on a much-cited study that has captured
public imagination since the publication of Hart and Risley’s
(1995) book Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience
of Young American Children. Hart and Risley’s research, from
the 1980s, was based on monthly one-hour recordings of
forty-two families in Kansas City. They tallied the number
of words addressed to each young child. Comparing four SES
levels, they extrapolated from toddlerhood to kindergarten
and estimated that by the beginning of kindergarten, the
“welfare” children—coincidentally all black—would have
heard approximately thirty million fewer words than the
children of professionals—coincidentally, all but one white.
Perhaps, Hart and Risley claimed, this could account for
children in poverty having worse educational outcomes?
A solution presented itself when a technological product,
the LENA “vocabulary pedometer,” was invented, a voice-
activated recorder that calculates the number of words ad-
dressed to children. Coaches could work with mothers to
teach them how to talk “better” and foster increased vocab-
ulary. It seemed like a brilliant, simple way to “bridge the
gap.” Even President Obama hoped that equality could be
achieved—perhaps by giving those poor children of color
the “missing words.”
A number of anthropologists and anthropologically ori-
ented psychologists have challenged this project’s methods
and concepts, warning about the dangers of “deficit think-
ing” and reverse causation (Avineri et al. 2015; Blum 2017b;
Johnson 2019; McKenna 2018; NPR 2018; Sperry, Sperry,
and Miller 2018). Who decides what is the standard from
which a “deficit” is discerned? What happens when people
claim a “cognitive deficit” because some children and fami-
lies fail to interact as middle-class white families do? How
have race and ideas about proper behavior intersected? What
should relations in a family look like? Should parents be teach-
ers? Is “joint attention” required to promote learning? Does
this have to be explicit? Schools require it, sometimes di-
rectly (“Look at the teacher.”)—even though anthropologists
have shown that learning occurs in many settings with dif-
fuse, abiding attention (Gaskins 2013), overhearing rather
than being instructed. In many settings, looking someone
in the eye would be regarded as hostile, impertinent, or
immoral.
Other questions follow: Who benefits from the LENA
device? What claims are being made, and to benefit whom,
on the basis of brain imaging and claims of optimal brain
functioning? If families are not engaging in direct instruction,
what else are they doing?
The “word gap” intersects with many research areas:
research on how people actually learn language across time
10 American Anthropologist •Vol. 000, No. 0 •xxxx 2019
and space, on brain imaging and its limitations, and on the
concept of a deficit, as well as on the intrusion of teach-
ing into the intimate setting of the home, going back to
Bernstein and his notion of a “totally pedagogized society”
(Evans and Rich 2011). Should schools match families or
families match schools (Flores and Rosa 2015)? This topic,
engaging specialists in race, class, gender, kinship, and neu-
roscience, illustrates what an anthropology of learning might
look like. Lewis (2018) uses it in his Anthropology Now piece,
“Educational Anthropology as a Resource for Teacher Ed-
ucators.” This example could serve well when people ask
what anthropology is, and could be used for teaching. It
also has important potential for engagement with real-world
problems.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF
LEARNING, EDUCATION, AND SCHOOLING (ALES)
Harry Wolcott proposed a focus on the anthropology of
learning back in the early 1980s. A meeting of interested
anthropologists at the 1980 AAA was, apparently, well at-
tended. But the call for action didn’t pan out.
The time has come to resuggest it. Many old questions
remain, newly invigorated or invigorate-able by the cur-
rent moment’s greater political fragmentation, begging for
anthropological understanding, and by decades of sophisti-
cated work on interaction, neuroscience and evolution, and
inequality.
Based on everything from Freud to the ACE projects, we
know that early experience is formative (Hirschfeld 2002,
623). Individual, family, community, and national stories
cannot be complete without some discussion of schooling,
learning, training, and education. Though it can be helpful to
distinguish learning, socialization, education, and schooling,
just as it is to distinguish formal, informal, and nonformal
learning, other insights may be gained through putting them
in conversation with one another. What are the different ef-
fects of separating people from life while they learn or having
them learn in the stream of activity? How does the agency
of learners affect not only measurable learning of skills and
knowledge but lifelong notions of the self? The proposed an-
thropology of learning connects with medical anthropology,
childhood and youth studies, lifespan studies, psychological
anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cognitive science and
neuroanthropology, science and technology studies, critical
race theory, queer studies, language socialization, policy,
practicing anthropology, and research on the nature of the
self, identities, power, and migration—essentially every di-
mension of human life.
Practically speaking, we might convene a panel at the
AAA annual meeting, or propose a new section, which must
include practitioners from multiple perspectives. We might
organize a special issue of American Anthropologist. We could
encourage blogs concerned with public discussion about LES
and about pedagogy. We could convene residential seminars.
Judith Friedman Hansen (1982, 189)—typically, pub-
lishing in Anthropology & Education Quarterly—argued that
“learning is at the very core of the discussion of anthro-
pology and the concept of culture.” We may have thrown
away the concept of culture, but learning is still—and should
be—central.
Anthropologists focused on LES need greater interac-
tion with anthropology as a whole. Anthropology needs
more attention to learning, and society, so consumed with
schooling and learning, needs to hear from anthropologists.
Perhaps the time for such interactions has now arrived.
Susan D. Blum Department of Anthropology, University of Notre
Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA; sblum@nd.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I am profoundly grateful to Deb Thomas,
four anonymous reviewers, and managing editor Sean Mallin for
their extremely helpful comments, suggestions, questions, chal-
lenges; their generous engagement with my article has made it much
stronger, though still flawed (like all work, especially as audaciously
grand as this). This piece has emerged from a decade and a half of
research on education, learning, and school—though I still feel like
an interloper—and from conversations with Netta Avineri, Kevin
Barry, Elise Berman, Martin Bloomer, Cat Bolten, Hillary Brass,
Jay Brockman, Katherine Bruna, Fina Carpena-M´
endez, Tamo Chat-
topadhay, Meghan Chidsey, Hae-Joang Cho, Jee Seun Choi, Cindy
Dell Clark, Cathy Davidson, Theresa Davey, Emmy Dawson, Peter
Demerath, Carolyn Pope Edwards, Lizzie Fagen, Christine Finnan,
Vanessa Fong, Peggy Froerer, Agust´
ın Fuentes, Sarah Galbenski,
Suzanne Gaskins, Ilana Gershon, Meredith Gill, Laura Gilliam, Stuart
Greene, Christina Gutierrez, Eric Haanstadt, Yuanmeng He, Shirley
Brice Heath, Terri Hebert, John Herzog, Diane Hoffman, Elena
Coronado-Jensen, Hannah Jensen, Lionel Jensen, Lauren Jhin, Eric
J Johnson, Rupa Jose, Lily Jingting Kang, Kate Johnson Kennedy,
Barunie Kim, Rebecca Klenk, David Lancy, Jim Lang, Blake Leyerle,
Dennis Littky, Teresa McCarty, Maria McKenna, Peggy Miller, Leslie
Moore, Brandon Moskun, Elinor Ochs, Alexis Pal´
a, Natalie Porter,
Ann Marie Power, Kaitlin Ramsey, Kate Riley, Christina Rogers, Bar-
bara Rogoff, EJ Sobo, Doug Sperry, Linda Sperry, Taylor Still, Gabriel
Torres, Julie Turner, Bonnie Urciuoli, Monica vanBerkum, Anne
Vieser, John Warner, Jake Weiler, Gail Weinstein, Nick Welna,
Matthew Williams, Addy Wilson, Caitlin Wilson, Ana Celia Zen-
tella, and Attina Zhang. Funding for some of these conversations
has come from NSF (Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem); Notre
Dame’s Kellogg Institute, College of Arts and Letters, Institute for
Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Office of Research, and Institute
for Advanced Study; the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment
Program. I’ve learned infinite amounts from students in many incar-
nations of Children and Childhood; The Anthropology of Childhood
and Education; and The Culture of College. Brandon Moskun dis-
cussed a draft. Helen Hockx-Yu provided the Chinese translation of
the abstract.
1. An exception is the rich literature on language socialization,
the approach within linguistic anthropology that inquires into
Blum •Why Don’t Anthropologists Care about Learning? 11
“socialization into and through language” (Kulick and Schieffelin
2004; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984). Socialization, in contrast with
culture and personality approaches to “enculturation,” emphasizes
interaction among many parties; children’s agency (Goodwin
1990; Kulick 1992; Paugh 2012); and lifelong language so-
cialization (Mertz 2007); cf the welcome combining of life
span research. ACYIG. n.d. CRN Life Course. http://acyig.
americananthro.org/crns/life-course/.
2. Equally frustrating is the disregard of anthropological work on
education outside anthropology. For example, in TheCaseagainst
Education, Caplan (2018) claims that for an economist he has
consulted broadly, reading in sociology, psychology, economics,
and education—never mentioning anthropology.
3. This was a truly fascinating exploration of the history of our field.
I highly recommend it.
4. See: https://data.unicef.org/topic/education/primary-educa
tion/.
5. See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/education-index.
6. See: https://www.malala.org/malalas-story; https://www.ny
times.com/2018/07/11/world/asia/afghanistan-jalalabad-
attack.html.
7. See: McGraw-Hill Education, “What Is Learning Science?”
https://www.mheducation.com/ideas/what-is-learning-scie
nce.html.
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