Hello, , from NHERI.

Sometimes gems arise in academics' articles on schooling. I have bumped into one.

Dr. Michael Cole presents us with his insightful - and I am resisting other flowery adjectives - piece, in a very widely read education journal, entitled, "What's Culture Got to Do With It? Educational Research as a Necessarily Interdisciplinary Enterprise."(endnote 1) Keep in mind that Dr. Cole is a distinguished professor of communication, psychology, and human development at the University of California, San Diego.

The title might not indicate it but he eventually begins sounding a lot like a modern advocate of home-based education (i.e., homeschooling).

Referring to other scholars' work, he writes the following: "... the dominant forms currently found in most contemporary industrialized and industrializing societies manifest the following set of common features:

1. Schools are internally organized to include age grading, sequentially organized curricula based on level of difficulty, and permanent buildings designed for the purpose of teaching.

2. Schools are incorporated into larger bureaucratic institutions so that the teacher is effectively demoted from "master" to low-level functionary in an explicitly standardized form of instruction.

3. Schools are redefined as an instrument of public policy and as preparation for specific forms of economic activity--"manpower development."

To this list I would add that such schooling is universally accompanied by increased social differentiation, not only in its internal organization but in the fact that those who perform their academic chores least adequately are channeled into low-paying, low-status jobs in the society. (p. 463-464)

Dr. Cole then moves into discussing "school reform" of the past 50 years, its definition and why, probably, the myriad efforts at reform have led nowhere significant.

Here is where he really begins to sound like a voice from the modern homeschool movement:

... the standard forms of mass schooling arose ... anywhere in the world where societies have grown large enough and their economies complicated enough to make necessary a complex division of labor, which implies the need for (a) a lot of specialized cultural learning, (b) the use of mediational means, such as written language ... and (c) restricted economic resources that make it necessary, and in some sense efficient, to have one person teach many novices at one time in a central location... . Not everyone can be average, let alone above average, in such a system. Power enters the scene as the power to exclude and credential. (p. 464)

Professor Cole theorizes that the needed re-formation of schooling "... will come about if, and only if, the constraints that produced this social form themselves change, making it possible for distinctly new forms to arise" (p. 464).

I wonder how many educational researchers, professors, scholars, and doctoral students reading this article this month are having visions of the roughly 30-year-old modern homeschool movement dance in their heads.

Just wait until I tell you more about Dr. Cole's ideas in another installment from us at NHERI.

If you are interested in tangibly supporting our work doing research, collecting research, disseminating research, and helping homeschool families around the world, you might visit www.nheri2010.org and consider the "donate" button. Or, just click here.

Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.

National Home Education Research Institute

http://nheri2010.org/

http://nheri.org/

P.S. Please feel free to send us your questions about homeschooling and we will try to answer them in upcoming messages.

Endnotes:

1. Cole, Michael. (2010). What's culture got to do with it? Educational research as a necessarily interdisciplinary enterprise. Educational Researcher, 39(6), 461-470.

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