George and Louise Spindler and the tasks of the educational anthropology. Part 2

Abstract

The article is devoted to the anthropology of education in the United States and the founders of this direction - the spouses George and Louise Spindler. For fifty years, the Spindlers have been involved in four interrelated fields of activity: psychological anthropology, educational anthropology, teaching anthropology, and editing a series of ethnographic monographs and textbooks. Their first fieldwork began with the processes of cultural change on the Menominee Indian Reservation and, in the field of education, the difficulties of teaching Mexican children in an American school. The main topics that J. and L. Spindler developed throughout their lives concerned the issues of educational anthropology, the transmission of cultural experience, the peculiarities of teaching different social groups in the context of American culture, teachers’ irrelevant perception of children’s behavior, as well as cultural therapy. Field studies at school, anthropological analysis of cases in educational institutions have shown that the work of an anthropologist allows you to reveal cultural prerequisites and prejudices in the education system, reveals the pitfalls of invisibility and misunderstanding of the values of different social groups. To solve these problems, the theory and practice of cultural therapy was developed as one of the varieties of clinical anthropology. In the concept of J. and L. Spindler, education was seen as a process of cultural transmission, and the teacher acted as its cultural agent. In specific anthropological studies of educational institutions, it was found that the social systems of school life can be based on illusions about various kinds of educational situations and there is a considerable risk that incorrect administrative decisions will be made on this basis. One of the key objectives of cultural therapy was to make anthropological research a tool for better understanding cultural expectations in educational situations.