W. T. Morrill and D. M. Steffy1 have performed a valuable service, for me and my students at any rate, if only by presenting many of the old saws about students in the guise of an anthropological essay on the two cultures of academia. They employ a distinction between “etic” and “emic” levels of cultural analysis: “emic” expresses the participants’ conceptualizations, while “etic” discloses the universalistic, objective understanding of an impartial ethnographer. They go on to characterize college life as reflecting two emically opposing cultures, academic and student. The “postulates” of academic culture are said to be
To turn, then, to what Morrill and Steffy say about academics' failure to notice the different cultural assumptions of their students — there is a certain thinness and air of inconsistency in their account. They remind us that very few academics are ever formally prepared for teaching, so perhaps they lack the skills of “motivating” students, skills which are the usual offering to school teachers for bridging a similar gap between teacher and taught. Morrill and Steffy go on to say that it is not really surprising that even social scientists pay little attention to the ethnography of teaching because all academics assume that their students share their own cultural assumptions. But, in fact and as Morrill and Steffy indicate elsewhere, the situation is rather more complicated: as academics, we do know that students’ aims and interests are often not ours, but we act on the hardly questioned assumption that they are, or should be pretty much the same. For instance, Philip Thody, professor of French at the University of Leeds, endorses Eric Hawkins’ observation regarding modern language teaching in English universities: “it was as if the university teachers were concerned only with a selection procedure which would produce a few graduates in their own image each year.” As Thody (1981) says, it still happens; and Thody cannot be alone in noticing that universities fail to cater for most of their students.
Morrill and Steffy offer something more in saying that academics misperceive grading: whatever academics think it is, “the distribution of grades in a class is a measure of the degree to which students deviate from the norms of our culture as teachers” (1980, p. 50). But why should anyone pay academics for indulging in what is in fact cultural rather than educational discrimination? Another anthropologist, Edmund Leach, in his unacademic reflections on academia, surely gets nearer an adequate account: “If society insists that individuals be segregated out into categories ... then the system will always have to waste an enormous amount of time and energy allocating individuals to the right slots and marking them up with the proper labels, but so far as education is concerned the whole operation is utterly irrelevant” (1968, p. 73). And since we are not only doing “society’s” dirty washing but also, as Bourdieu and Passeron insist, reproducing ourselves at the top of the grade hierarchy, there are indeed strong pressures on academics not to perceive what, “etically,” is going on. It is, then, I suggest, necessary to expand upon Morrill and Steffy’s explanation of the failure to recognize the social functions of sanctifying the “postulates” of academic culture.
But, for practising teachers, an even more pressing problem arises if one accepts Morrill and Steffy’s account of the “etic” facts of college teaching. The second aspect of their paper that I wish to focus on is their failure to take the measure of this problem. A natural response to the recognition of the objective facts of tertiary education is contained in the last clause of Leach’s remarks quoted above: “so far as education is concerned the whole operation is utterly irrelevant.” But if the whole operation of grading and associated activities are educationally irrelevant, why go on with them? Or rather, since one’s livelihood will no doubt be threatened if one refuses to play the game, why go on with them as a serious business? If “etically” my course is simply a hurdle to be gotten over in the obstacle race for marketable certification — and if one has no great love for what that market trades in — why not cut the hurdle down to nothing? There need not be any conscious cynicism here, though my worry is that the more one reflects on “etic” realities the more one is likely to choose to abandon the educative enterprise. When I have taught philosophy courses that were marginal, in the way Morrill and Steffy’s introductory anthropology course is marginal, I have found it remarkably difficult to fail anyone, or to defend such failing grades to colleagues who taught less marginal courses. When now I teach philosophical and sociological foundations of education, there are similar pressures. Some of the students have an interest in developing their skills as teachers, others are seeking some form of certification to open other and more profitable doors elsewhere. There is considerable reluctance to hinder their progress simply because they too cannot understand Basil Bernstein or because they cannot be bothered to clear their minds of contemporary cant about subjectivity or national development.
Of course, one can and does try to package the goods so that they can be used in ways the students might actually appreciate — Morrill and Steffy’s anthropology as a way to make friends and influence the local corporation; “baby logic” to avoid being taken in by one’s local newspaper; a rendition of Popperian epistemology to give a Freirean slant to one’s next chemistry lesson; and so on. What worries me still is that when once one plans a course with such useful, relevant, etc., spin-offs in mind, one unconsciously loses sight of educational goals; one may well end up with something indistinguishable from operationalized cynicism. I was abashed when a student told me she had been excited by grappling with the ideas of Tom Nagel — one can’t exactly sell them, or do much with them to improve one’s love life. It is possible to get excited by them, though, but then one is probably well on the road to swallowing the academic “postulates” themselves.
Transposed to the context of course content, what I am looking for is, I suspect, analogous to Young’s search for a way between “naive optimism and fatalistic pessimism” (1977) for radically inclined teachers. Having depicted a yawning chasm between staff and students, Morrill and Steffy seem rather optimistic about bridging it: a bit of relevance and the student’s innate Aristotelian desire to know — “it is obvious that students respond warmly to the opportunity to learn how to study socio-cultural phenomena” (1980, p. 71). I have tried to indicate one sort of pessimistic reaction to Morrill and Steffy’s account. I will end with two suggestions for overcoming this cynicism. They are only suggestions; I wish to provoke and promote discussion rather than end it.
One idea applies to my own present dealings with education but not perhaps so obviously to many other disciplines: the notion that it is quite permissible to teach the “etic” view of teaching itself. But, if there is no more to be said, this suggestion might allow me to proceed with a good conscience but at the cost of leading my students themselves to despair. If the “etic” view of teaching does support cynicism and despair about schooling, then teaching it isn’t going to do much for future teachers.
The second suggestion appeals to what we (it might be salutary to investigate further who this we is) want technicians, lawyers, teachers, etc., etc. to be like, as thinking beings. The suggestion admits, for example, that grading is pigeon-holing people, but says that one might as well make the best of a bad job and put literate, humane, critical individuals into the more prestigious pigeon-holes in place of the stunted homunculi whom inherited wealth and unjust schooling too often put there. The suggestion is perhaps too close for comfort to the definition of a gentleman as one who had forgotten Latin and Greek, and it has other difficulties too (perhaps most fundamental is the claim of some “etic” views of education that this sort of autonomous, oppositional education is an impossibility for the society generally). But I put it up in case anyone can refurbish it, or indeed provide some alternative way in which academics can sustain their ordinary practice in full acknowledgement of the “etic” view thereof, particularly when that view is rounded out in the way I briefly suggested with reference to Leach and Bourdieu.
1
W. I. Morrill and D. M. Steffy. “The Ethnography of Collegiate Teaching: Bridging the Student and Academic Cultures” Journal of Thought, Vol. 15, no. 3, 1980, pp. 49-75. They expound the opposed “postulates” of these cultures on pp. 52-57.2
As is suggested by Michael Logan and Alanson A. Van Fleet in a research note immediately after Morrill and Steffy’s article, these postulates may not apply to all students. The old saws and my “common knowledge” suggest that they apply to the majority of average students but not to the higher flyers who subscribe to the academics’ own view of the matter. Logan and Van Fleet do not put it this way since they claim that the student postulates fit failing groups.Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (trans. Richard Nice). Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1977.
Hawkins, Eric. Modern Languages in the Curriculum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l98O.
Leach, Edmund. A Runaway World? London: B.B.C., 1968.
Morrill, W. T. and Steffy. D. M. “The Ethnography of Collegiate Teaching: Bridging the Student and Academic Cultures” Journal of Thought, Vol. 15, no. 3, 1980, pp. 49-75.
Thody, Philip. “The teaching of modern languages” The Times Higher Education Supplement, May 1, 1980, p. 13.
Young, M. and Whitty, G. Explorations in the Politics of School Knowledge. Driffield: Nafferton Books, 1977.
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