Education Through the Anthropological Lens - A Conversation with Zineb Mouhyi, Corina Enache, Patrick Alexander and Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

There is a thing that when you question something that has become so entrenched that it's sacred, it's almost impossible for you to see it as otherwise. And that translation between how things are and the strangeness of what would it be if we had something else, it's very difficult to do. And I think anthropology can help in that kind of unpeeling.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. It's great to be back after a bit of a break in August, and we've got loads of fantastic episodes lined up throughout the end of this year and way into 2027. A recent guest on the podcast, Professor Tony Comero, highlighted that anthropology is one of the more underestimated and often excluded of the cognitive sciences. I completely agree, and since I discovered it in the early 2000s when I did my undergraduate degree in social anthropology at the University of Sussex, I've personally experienced it not as a subject discipline, but rather as a way of approaching the world and perhaps cognition itself. That's why this week I was so happy to bring together 4 amazing anthropologists who care deeply about this question and how it relates to educational transformations. Pascal Mampouangaya is a social psychologist, trainer and facilitator, researcher and CEO of Learn to Change, Change to Learn.

She's also a new grandmother.

Corinna Enake is a cultural anthropologist, founder and system worker at Kotka, a Netherlands-based consultancy helping living things grow well. She's also the host of The Human Show, Patrick Alexander is a social anthropologist and reader in education and anthropology in the School of Education at Oxford Brookes University. He's also the editor of the journal Teaching Anthropology. And lastly, Zineb Mouyi is a mother, daughter, writer, educator, scholar-activist, and PhD candidate in anthropology and social change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Zineb has also been a previous guest on the podcast in episode 184. You can find loads more links to their amazing work in the show notes.

Thank you so much. This is excitement and curious interest on my part to explore these questions of anthropology and education with you. How they might kind of speak to each other. As an anthropologist myself, or I did an undergraduate in anthropology, and I've always been really fascinated by how it's more than just a subject. Something about it kind of actually shifts how you, or speaking personally, how I experienced the world, how it kind of gave me a sense of almost like a lens on the world that was different to anything I'd ever experienced. So this was just at undergraduate level. So it feels like much more than just a kind of academic subject to me, hence my curiosity to do this and huge gratitude to all of you for being willing to dive into wherever this might take us. But if you're happy to, just to begin, if you could just really briefly introduce yourself and then perhaps reflect on what does this subject discipline opening invitation of anthropology mean to you? in your, it could be personal life, could be professional life, very open. But yeah, where does it resonate with your experiences?

Corinna, would you like to start?

Yeah, I'd love that. Thank you, Tim. Yeah, I'm Corinna Enache. I'm a Romanian anthropologist currently living in the Netherlands, and I work at the intersection of systems development, learning and development. Yeah. And I really found your question at the beginning quite difficult to answer because I had to really go back into my my own personal history to kind of like track my interest with anthropology. And I describe myself as somebody who really wanted to understand ever since I was very young how people can live together honestly with integrity and without oppression. And I found in anthropology kind of a way to work on that question. It's because I grew up, I am the last generation that grew up under communism in Romania, the last regime. And I grew up under a regime that explicitly told me what to think and who to be. And I found my own freedom in books, Like in other imagined societies that I could really try being something else. And I came out of that with quite a wary relationship with authority and kind of like a real hunger to know how people make life together on their own terms. And I came to anthropology as a discipline late because I started in business and strategy. I worked for really large multinationals, and at some point I was working in Brazil and I met a team of anthropologists. That showed me a video of a little girl crying in a haircare salon while her hair was being chemically straightened and her mother telling her, don't worry, it would hurt more if you go to school with curly hair. She was 7 and the chemical treatment was burning her scalp. So then the anthropologist showed me this video of like 3 minutes and then asked me, how responsible do you feel as representing the largest beauty company in Brazil for this? And I remember that was the moment that I said, this is what I want to do in my life. So one week later, I quit my job and went and studied anthropology in the Netherlands. And then years later in New Zealand, I had the mirror opposite, let's say, experience where a Māori businessman at the time asked me the same question. How responsible did I feel for him being labeled a noble savage, for his ancestors' clothes sitting in a glass case in the University of Auckland? And then I remember then and there I thought, ooh, do I really want to be an anthropologist? It really feels like everything that I set up to be in life, now anthropology is against it. And I want to credit David Graeber and Lila Abu-Lughod for kind of convincing me to hang in there personally. But for me, I did not know how to practice anthropology in a way that wasn't extractive. And it felt like doing it in an extractive way kind of sat against all the intentions that I had. And then what I told that Māori businessman is that I did feel responsible, and that's why I wasn't there to study him for a university project, but he was interviewing me for a job. So he would tell me what he would need, my work would serve that, and the results and the power would actually also flow his way. And I think for me, that's kind of like where I've landed with anthropology. I think it's very important who is taking the authority to say who somebody is. And for me, that is a very important thing, both in my practice in change and development as it is in learning and education. Like, who really has the authority to say who somebody is and what is their story and where are they going? And then my work is all about, you know, how can you enable that and how can you keep handing that authority back to the person and really to stay uncomfortable about what's the position that I have in how I manage it? Because you can never be outside of this, let's say, structures of power and authority. So yeah, this is a bit of my story with the discipline.

Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Pascale, would you like to go next?

Sure, Tim. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you. So my name is Pascale Mounpoingaya. I am French and Haitian. I'm an educator, a researcher, but I also dealt in training policymakers. So very involved in EU policymaking and education. What I like about this is that I was able to work with teachers, practitioners, with students, and then engaging with policymakers. Really, the previous experience helped me try to bring them a little bit away from data and information and to integrate more participatory approaches so that the stakeholders would really be involved in decision-making, or at least in their thinking towards decision-making and policymaking. Methods that allow us to see things not as discrete separate entities, but always seeing things in relationship to each other. So this is where anthropology for me was very important because I think there are, the methods of anthropology allow us to do, have this systemic approach in research. And for me, anthropology was my first activist opportunity or something that brought me to become activist because what I met there was a very colonial approach to anthropology and to other cultures in general, with lots of essentializing of the other. And what happened is that we had a few students who were from West Africa, and when they wanted to do their thesis on their own communities, they were told, oh no, no, you can't do anthropology on your own community, which we found a very racist thing actually to do. So we created an organization inside the university to resist that vision of anthropology. So what happened later in life is that when I became an educator, all this sort of came back. I was working with migrant women and then refugee women and anthropology of medicine was something that became very important for me, which is a way of explaining how we make meaning of health, illness, and sickness. And also working with rural women from West Africa and doctors of the European medical tradition, seeing how to bridge different meanings we put behind health and illness was one of the best experiences I had in using anthropology to actually engage people from Different walks of life and very different understandings of the world around them to communicate around the way they sense things, the way they understand things, the way they explain things, et cetera. So it was a positive, a negative experience, and then a very positive experience. But I always have behind me this, like, really going away from this colonial approach because I do think it is And what Corinna was saying earlier, there is this kind of ongoing issue in the field. So when I came back to Europe, I worked in the US and in France. And when I came back to Europe, I was lucky enough to work for the Council of Europe. And this is an organization that works only on democracy, peace, and human rights. It has nothing to do with the EU. It doesn't do policy. It's really a kind of big NGO. And through this, experience, I was able to travel all over Europe for 15 years encountering teachers, students, ministries of education, and talking about what is it to transform the school experience, school as a community, classroom, classroom as a community, to integrate more democratic participatory approaches. And for me, it's really action research. That came up as one of the approaches to professional education where we were really giving back agency to teachers with their students. It was a specific type of action research that we call living theory. So teachers were engaged in observing themselves and their students and engaging in research with their students about what was happening in the classroom. And that was very liberating, a very powerful way for teachers to move away from the straitjackets and the standards that they, they were imposed on. And working with living theory was also moving away from this habitual theory-to-practice environment that we're in. It is very different in meeting reality in its own context and its complexity and actually meeting the mess. If you're observing things in relationship with the people that you're in the classroom with, so teachers and students in relationship, it really shows how much there is detail, context, and the mess that goes with it. So for me, anthropology is a part of this type of action research, even though I was working with Jane McNeiff's living theory model. They don't themselves much talk about anthropology, but what they're actually doing is giving anthropology as a tool to professionals for them to develop themselves. Wow. And for students to regain power. I would even say teachers to relinquish some of their power and students to gain more of it.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Pascale. Zineb, you want to go next?

Happily. Thanks for having me, Tim. And yeah, what a pleasure being on, on this Conversation with you all. So a little bit about me. My name is Zineb. I'm based in Vancouver in Canada. I'm from Morocco. I would describe myself as a scholar, like a PhD candidate. I'm still studying anthropology and still feel like the more I learn about this field, the more I realize how little I know. And to me, it participates the beauty of like just knowing how much trying to understand humans is complex. And yeah, most of my work before that has been in education. I've had the chance of actually living and being in many places in Europe and in the Middle East and the Americas, mostly as a student. And I feel like I seeked as a student as many exchanges as I could get because I really wanted to see, is education done differently in other places? And I, I did that in China, in the UK, in France, in Brazil. in Senegal and Morocco. And what I found out is that there is actually not as much difference as I really, really craved for. And so initially I had worked in education policy and my disillusionment with the international development sector and the policy sector and how slow education was moving, to be honest. I kind of had this realization early in my work in this space that the conversations that were being had in education about the need to change the education system have been the same ones for quite a long time. I think I had this, you know, like epiphany while reading a book that was written in the '50s that said almost the exact same thing as the panel that I had been at before. And I was like, no, no, no, I can't, we can't spend a life doing this, right? So that's what pushed me to actually go towards anthropology because of the intersection. For me, my degree is anthropology and social change. So it's really trying to understand humans in order to understand how human societies evolve. And what I strongly feel is we are at this kind of historical intersection where we know and see that the world needs a dramatic change. And so to me, it's almost like unless we understand how group of people can change together and look at both our historical record and contemporarily what is happening, we're not going to be able to actually have the right processes in order for the kind of change that I'm hoping to see in my lifetime to happen. So that's really what drew me to this field. And then because of education, it's also like looking at all the ways that education has taught us who we are implicitly and explicitly. And my expertise is specifically on the role of education in colonization and decolonization processes, which obviously there's a lot to say there and I'll, I'll leave it there for now. Yeah.

Thank you. And Patrick.

Thanks, Tim. Thanks everybody. Really nice to be here for this conversation today. So in true anthropological style, I'll try and tell this through a story, right? I was raised in colonial Hong Kong. That's my background. And I came to anthropology through Latin American studies. So that was my kind of my route into anthropology as a discipline was through area studies. And I was actually not at all interested in education when I first studied anthropology. I was interested in maritime piracy. So for a long time, I was really interested in culture at sea. I was interested in the history of how human cultures sort of act differently when they're cut off, you know, unanchored from the coast. And so I was completely ready to do a PhD looking at sort of cosmopolitanism and cultural complexity in maritime pirates in Southeast Asia, and then changed direction and trained to be a teacher. And I think the really striking thing for me was the kind of visceral experience of becoming a teacher in my early 20s. connected dots between anthropology and education. And I was struck by the strangeness of the experience of being a young adult pushed into a kind of strangely timeless adult role. So now to your point, this kind of strange world that hadn't changed since I was at school. And I think that was the first thing that kind of drew me towards anthropology of education specifically. And I was really lucky to teach undergraduate archaeology and anthropology at St. Hugh's College at Oxford for quite a number of years. And that was an education for me as well, to teach anthropology, I think, was another way into anthropology of education. And if I can say anything that has been powerful for me about building an academic career in this subdiscipline, it's about, I think, an education into humility. For some reason, when you were talking before, I was— a memory popped into my head of walking down Banbury Road in Oxford, past the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, and there was a skip outside and it was full of books. It was full of 19th century monographs that the library didn't have room for anymore, and they were throwing them away. And I just stood and stared at this dumpster, this skip, and thought, how much knowledge is there that you will never touch, let alone any kind of claim to have a complete knowledge of any concept or any people? So I think in that way, anthropology done well can be a great education in humility to kind of humble yourself and know your small place in the world, but also hopefully an education into the indefinite. You know, I think as a social science, maybe that's one of the great benefits of anthropology done well, is to be able to position yourself differently to, you know, other people in education, which as we know has been psychologized, you could say, into the finite and the firm. And, you know, I'm sure other people will have more experience of this than me, but that doesn't always ring too well in policy circles, the indefinite. But that to me is what is, you know, really, really powerful about anthropology. Done badly, obviously, as we know, anthropology has a long history of trying to define people and things, trying to reinforce those taxonomies. So it can have that effect too. And I think personally for me, the thing that always excites me about anthropological work is that old Ska song, you know, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think. I always have this feeling that, you know, there is just so much more out there to learn and explore and grapple with, not really to understand. I think the longer I do this kind of work, the less likely that is. But yeah, there is always something else.

Yeah, amazing.

Yeah, more pirate. Maybe we need more pirate in education.

Amen.

But maybe just picking up on that then into, I mean, you've all started bringing out some of the shadow side of this and some of, but also some of the kind of generative possibilities that anthropology brings in. One of the things that I've always been interested in, it may have been Nora Bateson, but I can't actually remember who it was who said it initially where I heard it. But this idea that you don't quite know if you are in an anthropological stance, let's say, you don't quite know what you're looking at or for because you're kind of, there's an inherent, particularly if you're in a culture that is really not familiar to you, which often that has been. Pascal, to your point about doing anthropology at home, I think there's a way of maybe doing that everywhere and staying curious and humble in every situation. But there is an interesting thing there about the openness to being responsive and noticing when you don't quite know what it is you're looking for. And that's always interested me and how that relates to then a disposition of learning. And, you know, we start into the connections with education, but just maybe staying with the level of like social change and some of the things that you've been bringing up, making meaning, making life, all of this, like really generative stuff that anthropology can do, plus its shadow side of being a colonial science, plus Zineb, as you brought in all of the, you know, the real intractable challenges that we are kind of facing down as a species. What comes up for you in terms of where anthropology can be of use there? Corinna, I take your point about applied anthropology, but we are not necessarily wanting to make it an instrument, but I think it can offer some Something.

So yeah, perhaps I can say something.

Yeah, please do.

I think I really love what you're saying about Nora and how she described anthropology. And for me, it's something similar because I think as an anthropologist, you learn very soon to pay attention to the particular, you know, which Graeber had this really beautiful concept called structural stupidity. And he said that in large-scale systems, they are permitted to stop attending to the particular. So the subordinate has always have to imagine the powerful, but then the powerful kind of always forgets about the particular and then become locked into this understanding that becomes rigid. This is what this big monolithic thing is, and you, individual, have to fit into it. And I always thought, you know, paying attention to the particular is what creates possibilities for change, because in the particular is where you see the disruption, the cracks, the renewal of a particular system. And I think that's what an anthropologist really brings into a system, because over time, any system that holds on to the structural, the capacity to attend to the particular really is atrophied, you know, because nothing in the structure really rewards keeping it because it's against the normativization of that structure. So then the result is this institution that's become less able to really see what's in front of it and really deal with opportunities to renew itself. So that's what I think that, that really an anthropological lens brings.

Yeah.

What comes up for me when you mentioned this as well is You know, especially you mentioned that people who are in positions of power tend to not look at themselves. And it reminded me of this Laura Nader's paper, 1972 paper on studying up and the importance of actually starting to study the colonizers as well from an anthropological perspective. And this notion that usually the elite and the wealthy kind of tend to escape the gaze, our gaze generally, but the anthropological gaze in particular. And this notion that like actually there is a group dynamics of people in power that also needs to be understood. So for me, it's funny because I've been thinking a lot about like all the ways that who is studied and why, and reposing that question in a way that if the question was, how do we actually change the world in a way that serves people, who would we need to study and how? You know, and I feel like anthropology can, has the power to answer those questions in an interesting way. And what is fascinating is that call for studying the elites in an anthropological way happened in the '70s, and still we haven't seen much of that. It's still a huge gap in anthropology. And the last thing I wanted to say about this is also, to me, the really, the purpose of anthropology is this notion that the world is made of difference and anthropology helps you create safety for difference because we can see it without being scared of it. And so I feel like in this highly divisive societies that we live in, anthropology has that role of making us look at one another lovingly.

Yeah. I came across, I think a few months ago, Oswald de Andrade's work called antropofagia. Maybe you have heard it or maybe not, but it's a concept that he talks about how he wrote a book called Antropofago in Brazil that took the concept of a cannibal and turned it into a method. So Brazilian culture shouldn't really imitate Europe or reject it. That was his main claim, but it should devour it and be transformed And this concept of meeting another culture and not necessarily seeing it and transcribing it, but putting it through yourself, through your own body, and getting transformed by it in the process, that for me felt kind of like the opposite of extraction, which an anthropologist usually does. Because if you meet something that is foreign to yourself and you capture it without really being transformed by it, how accurate your capture actually is, like, how can you truly avoid the exoticized gaze? And how can you even avoid perpetuating these taxonomies? But this idea of, you know, just being in a culture and being so immersed that you are actually transformed by that instrument, I found very exciting.

Yeah.

Wow.

Interesting. Pascale?

Yeah, I think Patrick kept on saying anthropology as it is done well, when it is done well. Well, that's the trick. When you're observing, you are part of your observation. And I think that is something that oppression and power structures help us forget much too often. And also, I'm going to pick up on, in Patrick's story, at some point you felt it was a strange environment. You became a teacher, you were a young teacher, and the strangeness really appeared. I think that's extremely important because in very normative environments, we tend to think, I'll take the example that I had with a teacher and she thought of herself as a good teacher and she was allowing students to participate. Her values are very democratic, and we started working with this anthropological work inside her classroom. And from something that seemed very normal to her, as she was observing and observing herself, the relationship of her and her students with the material, the curriculum, the assessment practices, etc., as she thought she was inclusive, She was discovering how strange actually the universe of her classroom was. So going from this very normative, reified way of seeing her reality to a more true and authentic sense of strangeness. And I think that's why it is ethical when you're doing anthropological work, when you are affected by What you are observing and how you're observing yourself observing. She had these values. She discovered, for example, that these students who were disruptive were at the back of her classroom, that if they didn't make too much noise, then there was kind of a pact. She wasn't asking them too many test questions or too many, not bothering them. They didn't bother her. She didn't bother them. There was kind of a pact going on there. And she was able to deconstruct what was happening to change the image of herself. I have these values, but I'm a, I'm a living contradiction actually, because I think these are my values that I'm practicing. But as I observe my praxis, I see that I'm actually oppressive and guiding on the oppressive habits we have in our societies. So I really enjoy that anthropology is also for us a way to direct our attention to what matters. For example, she observed her assessment practices and she thought she was a fair assessor, that she gave enough time to everyone, et cetera. And in the end, what she saw is that what she was assessing was not what mattered to her. And evaluating what you value is something so central to a purposeful education. We discovered this together with her research. It was It's once again very liberating. But what I find very fascinating is this movement from the normative to the strange.

I love it. Thank you. Patrick, did you wanna jump in?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, just, you know, when everyone was talking there, I was thinking it's so interesting. I find for myself when talking about anthropology in the abstract that it's, it's really easy for me to end up on the hard sell for anthropology. I think, you know, so often because it's a, you know, it's a marginal discipline in the social sciences, I find myself in this kind of persuasive sort of rhetorical position where I'm saying, here's the argument for anthropology. And of course that's down to the fact that, you know, at least in the UK, but, you know, I think elsewhere as well, if you say you're an anthropologist, people think that you are digging up bones, right? That's the kind of go-to misunderstanding of what an anthropologist is. And of course that's our fault to an extent, right? And I think it is partly, you know, that this intellectual history, you know, a kind of historical issue that the discipline has had about sort of having to justify its existence in various different ways, often, you know, to the detriment of Probably of the kind of intellectual pursuits of anthropology. So, you know, on one hand, there are so many different intellectual histories that are about kind of reifying what it is that we do and what we don't do and what's an ethnography and what's not. And, you know, and yet at the same time, you know, to your point, Pascal, the wonder of anthropology is in those kind of intellectually irreverent moments where you are trying to go beyond the limits of any kind of bounded definition to get closer to the kind of amazing and always unsettling complexity of what it means to be alive to be human. So who knows, maybe one of the things that is really exciting that anthropology can offer to education is to kind of let go of itself and to say, to kind of paraphrase Tim Ingold on ethnography, enough about anthropology already. Let's just get into the, to your point, Corinna, about let's get to the particulars. Let's draw on whatever disciplinary tools or ideas we need to in order to look at what's in front of us. And one way to kind of flip that argument would be to say, well, is it interesting for us not to ask when does anthropology finally sell its wares to education? But to ask the question, why is it that we are seeing more and more anthropology in educational discourse? You know, I think most people who are doing research in anything to do with ecology, to do with, you know, more-than-human life on Earth, thinking about, you know, systems of education beyond where they are now, what might be described as development, so many of those discussions are orienting them towards what you might call an anthropological perspective. And so that to me is another interesting way to ask the question is to say, well, not what can you do for anthropology, but what can anthropology do for your education or something along these lines?

Yeah, no, but I would say that's exactly where my curiosity was to do this episode because I mean, I shared with you in the questions beforehand, the quote from Mary Catherine Bateson, human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural and often as sacred. And that idea, Pascal, as you were really powerfully talking about making strange and that kind of the ability, to me, it's somehow what I feel is happening more and more to your point, Patrick, but also being called for more and more is an ability to reflexively self-examine and system examine to say like, how have we got ourselves into this fucking mess?

Right?

Like, excuse my French, but like—

Yeah.

Like in all sorts of ways, we've got ourselves into a real mess and there's some deep, deep path dependencies built into that mess that maybe we want to start getting a little bit aware of in order to, can we do differently, be differently in relation to that? Maybe we can, maybe I'm not entirely sure, but it definitely feels to me an important first step to become aware of. I often use the phrase, it could have been different. It didn't have to be like this. It has evolved and emerged and developed and whatever verb you wanna put in there to become like, to your point, Zineb, the school system. I just don't love the argument that it was always, it had to be like this, right? This is just an inevitability to, that humans had to organize in this particular way and put children in white boxes and separate them from the world and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So highly biased perspective, I recognize.

Yeah.

As an impartial host here. But that is to me something of what was my pull to have this conversation. Because exactly to your point, Patrick, it's showing up. Like, how do we become a little bit more aware of the things that we just haven't seen? Many of us haven't seen, right?

Yeah. What I really love about the quote from Mary Bateson is the word sacred, because I do think that there is a thing that when you question something that has become so entrenched that it's sacred, it's almost impossible for you to see it as otherwise. And that translation between how things are and the strangeness of what would it be if we had something else, it's very difficult to do when you have entrenched something as sacred. And I think anthropology can help in that kind of unpeeling. I remember one of the best things that I read in Graeber and Wengrow's book, you know, The Dawn of Everything. He gives this account of this past civilization that used to dismantle their sacredness once in a while, and then whatever they needed, you know, they changed it from one season to another. And there is this really famous little story, I think, about the Lakota that were extremely democratic, like 8 months of the year. And when the hunt from the buffalo season came, they would set up these extremely authoritarian structures because then it really mattered, you know, like if somebody did the wrong thing while they were in a buffalo hunt, the whole community could die. So then they had this authoritative regime for only 2 months a year to protect the community. And under that regime, people could You know, kill each other if they were the police. But then immediately after the hunt was over, they would dismantle it and would become democratic again. So this kind of ability, you know, to change the structure depending on what is needed, I think we've kind of lost that and things have become really entrenched. One of the other things that I really liked is one of the books that stays with me about the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe you've read it. It's called Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More. One of the best titles of a book.

That's a good title.

Oh my God. Yeah, from Alexei Yurchak. And what I really love about this is that he talks about how people have largely stopped believing in the system while continuing to perform the ritual perfectly. So then the system had become so fragile, but nobody was actually aware that it has become fragile because the performance of the system was so flawless.

Hmm.

So then when it fell, it was like abrupt and from one day to another. And I think this coming back again to the particular, like if we are able to really pay attention to the strangeness that happens at the margin, to the particular, to the gaps in this performance, then we are able to anticipate better that kind of fragility and, and, you know, be able to allow space for other things to emerge.

I think in the relationship between anthropology and education, it's also super important to understand that because education is the, I think Zach Stein called it like the human-making function of society, how we educate people and how cultures form and how the two interact with one another. is extremely important to understand. So for me, it's, it's not just that we need to, to understand who we are in order to understand what kind of education we need to receive, but we need to look at how our education got this way in order to understand how the world got this way and why was it that we were, that education was designed that way because there were intentional decisions in order to make a certain kind of population, which to me, I see this as like the process by which the colonial education became dominant is also like, I really understand colonial education as having started in the West. So in order for colonization to be conceived as an idea that could be transported elsewhere, it needed to be existing in the minds of the colonizers. So the colonized industrial education model moves from the colonizer to the colonized in a way that creates the world. world. So it's also unpacking that and starting to point at education to some extent as the source of our problems, which is a hard thing to say because especially as people who are passionate, I'm very passionate about the education and have been for as long as I can remember. And I remember the moment that I realized, oh, education is implicated in what we're dealing with here. And so it needs to be unpacked and it needs to be, the history of it needs to be understood. The history of those ideas need to be understood in order for us to actually be able to say, let's step back and see what, who are we teaching young people about who they are? And that to me is also like the key thing that I would love to hear people's thoughts on, which is how does education teach a worldview and how, like what we're talking about here when we're talking about social change and how to address our issues is how do we start embracing a way way of seeing and being in the world that enables us to be different people in the world, you know? Because unless we actually look at the question of how do we see the world, how do we understand who we are, we're not going to be able to go past— yeah, it's not a question of policy as far as I'm concerned. And that's why, like, as much as I have this passion for education, I felt the need to step away from it because I felt like a lot of what's happening in education is stuck at the level of policy, which is super important. I'm not dismissing that at I just feel like it's this intersection between anthropology and education that is actually going to enable us to create the new kind of education that creates the new humans that will create the new world. Maybe it's a bit simplistic, but I like the schema a bit to try to make sense of it, at least for myself.

I love it. And a podcast episode is going to create that whole ripple effect.

At least if we're not doing that, what are we doing?

Maybe just to add one point of that, because I think for me, just talking about the educational and you all have much more experience in it than I have. But for me, it's also important, like, how do you move from the transferring knowledge into starting treating education as participation? You know, like how Pascal was talking earlier about all of those other initiatives. I think it's very difficult when you have an entrenched institution to really move from transferring knowledge to participation. I read a little bit on Jan Love's and Étienne Wenger's work on situated learning. And I found that quite fascinating because they studied apprenticeships and how people used to learn much closer to the actual practice of work and living. That made it in some way more authentic to how human beings learn. And also there were sites where their agency was more stimulated to come out and feel. And I think that what they found in particular is that people learn by being allowed to do the real thing, do the real thing at the edge of your community badly, and then reflect on it and then do it again. And then that's how he calls it, I think, legitimate peripheral participation. And then the work is real. You have agency over it. And then something happens as a result of it rather than just a classroom replica of how work or society looks like, where it's more likely an instrument of indoctrination rather than an instrument of real learning.

Yeah, interesting. We've had— I've actually had Étienne and Beverly Wenger-Trainer on the podcast before. Oh, so yeah, yeah. But no, thank you. That's brilliant. And, and yeah, I mean, just the work is real. Like, to me, just in a really simple way, like, how can we engage young people in real work? Like, not, as you say, not simulated work, which is in service to, you know, the outcomes, the knowledge, whatever. But yeah, no, interesting. Pascale, please.

Well, I wanted to riff off after Zeynep's intervention because I have left education. I lost faith in the capacity of changing this very heavy institutional structure. So I left education and now I'm in a homestead and I'm actually trying to have the lowest carbon footprint. I'm really looking at my water consumption. I'm doing food sustainability. And I think I'm a great subject for an anthropologist to come and look at what am I doing here. The most fun part is when my American friends come over, explaining them how to use a dry toilet.

Nice.

So Zainab, you were saying? Well, education and schooling, I think it's, it's worth also separating both. Okay. Because we have education in all our areas of life at home, when we're in the streets, when we're watching TikTok or whatever, there's education going on everywhere, but schooling is, is what I I was really delving with and trying to think about. And, um, I don't think it's a human-making machine. I think it's a worker-making factory. And because that was the premise of schooling, is to make people ready for the workforce, I mean, we can't change a bit or a part of it because every other part is going to restabilize it into what it was meant for. I do think there is hope in the less institutional structures of education that we're seeing emerge, less formal, et cetera. And I find it interesting that this whole, I, where I read the article you shared, so it was the role of anthropology in seeing futures in education.

Yeah.

But what I found interesting is like, how do you work on futures in education when education is the future because it's forming it in the way it's forming our minds, our reactions, et cetera. So I just wanted to put that out there.

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. I mean, deeply implicated, right? As, as Zeynep was saying, but I don't know, does anyone know, anyone want to respond to that idea of, and Zeynep, you asked the question about worldview and Pascal, I hear you kind of gesturing towards that as well. It's like the deep implication of schooling or more broadly education socialization in this kind of deep worldview-making thing that is deeply cultural, I would say. And good fodder for anthropology too, right?

Absolutely. I mean, I'm— Zeynep, you were talking about writing a book earlier, and I'm in the final throes of writing a book as well, where the first chapter is trying to deal with this big question. I couldn't agree more with the challenge that there is about thinking about education anthropologically without falling into the trap of thinking about education as the means to civilization. You know, if we want to go back and say, well, what is it that makes us human? I think you could safely say one of the things that is specific to us as a species, and of course we can get into the multi-species conversation, is our capacity for education, right? It's, you know, if we were to say, well, what makes us human? One thing would be, you know, that we educate each other. Another thing would be our engagement with technology and probably, you know, something like creativity or imagination would be a third part. So, you know, if you think convivial, Education, techniques, imagination, those things come together. And if you look at the archaeological record, absolutely, you know, to your point, Corinna, you're going to find evidence of education in the leftovers of, you know, chipped stone tools that never made it to the, you know, to the utility belt, you know, cave paintings. So the history, you know, the kind of evidence of education is extremely long in terms of our species. But that for me, one of the real challenges that I'm still struggling with is how to talk about education without talking about civilization. And so often, you know, there are different ways that education is weaponized to create that teleology, right? To be able to say either we think we're exceptional because of our capacity for complex social organization, technological, you know, prowess, and education is central to that. So we look at the classic civilizations or any kind of, we look to antiquity, we look to monumental architecture, all the rest of it to say education is what made us the fittest. You know, that ultimately is one of the arguments that's made there. And I think, you know, you mentioned David Graeber earlier, Karina, you know, obviously that book offers us a different version of that story, which is a really powerfully different way to think about education. Or, you know, I think more recently and prior to schooling, but essential to schooling, there is a whole challenge there about how education has been used to talk about civility. You know, what is it that makes you appropriate? get, you know, to be included? What is it that marks out people as being educated? You know, when you say in most Romance languages that somebody is educated, it means they have the right manners, right? They behave appropriately for their setting. And of course, you don't need an anthropologist to tell you that education is the principal weapon of colonialism, right? So in order to civilize other people, you know, second only to genocide is education as a weapon for colonialism. So, you know, trying to tell that story in a different way through education, I think, is a really powerful challenge, you know, to go from the particular to the biggest possible question, to your point, Zeynep, I think is fundamental. And it's exciting because there is a possibility to do that, right? To say, well, if we imagine what education looked like, if it wasn't used for these different things, what could it be? And what is it? And then you can look elsewhere in the contemporary world to find examples of where education is something other than what it has become, which is of course, to paraphrase Stephen Ball, that intolerable institution the school. And so to me, that's a, that is a really crucial, exciting, but really difficult challenge to think education differently and to think about it beyond that horizon of, of now, what most people think about as education, which is schooling.

If I can just add here, Patrick, I love this notion of the big questions, you know, 'cause for me there's fundamental questions that when you arrive on this earth as a human, you're gonna want to answer at some point, which such as who I am, why I am, where are we, why are we here, like the big questions of life. And what I find very troubling is that usually, like, we are, even as parents, it's very rare that there is an intentional approach to answering those questions. And in schooling, in colonial schooling in particular, there is a way of answering those questions that is implicit because there's this notion that we're not supposed to talk about the big things. And perhaps that's like a home philosophy, your religion, however you see the world, but it's fundamentally untrue. We address those questions very insistently through the whole structure of even how the school is beyond what we teach. It's just even the way we move within the school teaches you who you are, what you're meant to do, all those things. So I think, you know, that's what anthropology helps us do is like unpack those questions and unpack how we go about answering them. And to me, reviewing education for a new world is actually saying, Can we start talking about what's real? Like, if there are gonna be big questions like that, that every child's gonna have, and we have a worldview that creates the world as a result, can we actually start to be intentional about how we wanna answer those questions together? You know, and the worldview that feels aligned with the kind of world we wanna exist in, the world we, we want for our children at the end of the day.

And grandchildren.

Corinna, did you wanna Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, growing up in Romania under communism, the school was the ultimate unsafe place next to the church and the prison. That's where you definitely could not be yourself at all, to the point that I remember when we started learning the poetry, the big poets of our country, the professor would come and say, this is the poetry, this is the poem, and this is what you need to learn about the poem, how to interpret at it. And then you were being like evaluated based on you memorizing somebody else's interpretation of the poem and reciting it correctly, because this is how the educational system in communism were trying to make sure that we all thought the same about the big questions. But what I thought made that very interesting is that it was a very explicit system of oppression, whereas when I moved into the West and I started engaging with the schooling system, I realized that, oh, this is also a system of oppression, but it's Implicit.

Exactly.

Not so explicit. And then when it's so explicit, that means that you have the possibility to organize and resist it, no? We made our own study groups as children, you know, we were sitting outside and reading forbidden books. We had teachers that would try to resist the system as well and try to create spaces of conversations that were different. And somehow for me, I thought, now looking back, I think that system taught me more about how to think than all of the other systems that I experienced in the West because of that explicitness, you know? When I started studying anthropology in Amsterdam, it took me a long time to realize how colonial the anthropological educational system actually still was, because in language it didn't seem colonial, but in practice it was 100% colonial. But it was so difficult to kind of like pinpoint, and therefore it was much more difficult to resist it. It was much more difficult to transform it.

Marina, what you're saying is so important. I was working in an international European group on a competence framework for students, for them to have citizenship, democratic citizenship competencies. And it was divided in categories. Okay. So we're again, putting things in small pieces, attitudes, skills, knowledge, and understanding. And then most of the people from UK and Germany wanted to add the category values.

Values.

And what happened there in the group of experts around this table was that all our experts from Eastern Europe are like, oh no, no, you're not going to do that again. You're not going to put the values back because we just escaped from that and we're not going to start again. So it just shows how you were describing these 2 systems where it was explicit, where, and another system in the West where The indoctrination was more tacit, but I think it allowed these experts experiencing the school system there how dangerous it was to put the values inside the framework. Whereas us in a tacit system, we were like, yeah, it's true, you do need values to be an active citizen in democracy, et cetera. Yeah, but—

It's incredibly tricky, Right. I mean, it's so interesting because as you were talking about earlier, Pascal, about purpose and like reorienting around the purpose of education, there are implicit values in what you hold to be purposeful or to be of a desirable purpose. I mean, it's, and there's often a move among kind of more progressive or activist educators to bring values back in to say, actually, no, what we want to connect more with the things that we deeply care about because part of the problem is that they haven't been allowed into the space. And it's, I mean, yeah, completely fascinating. The only thing I wanted to also just acknowledge, which I think sometimes gets implicitly ignored, is the teachers in the systems. Because sometimes there's a kind of a grad grindian villain that the teacher is positioned as somehow the enforcer of these indoctrinating systems. And Carrie Facer, who was on the podcast recently, she interestingly highlighted to me, which I'd never thought about before, the difference between schools and school And the fact that schools are very human places with humans and Pascal, your point about professionalization of teachers. I mean, teachers are humans trying to navigate these rigid and oppressive systems as well as the young people in them, and often doing quite subversive work in those spaces as well to circumvent some of the things that happen there. And I think, I mean, maybe Patrick, you've, in your ethnographies of schools, I'm I mean, but it's, I just wanted to bring that in because I think it's important to name that there are incredibly loving, well-meaning educators in these systems who are also trying to figure out what do these young people in front of me need? What can I do from this heavy system, Pascal, as you mentioned, within the limits of that, how can I be of service to young people? There's obviously the full range of humans in the systems doing what they can, but it's, yeah, I guess I just I felt an urge to name that. So maybe if we, I don't know if you are open to wrapping up with a, just a, I'm conscious that this conversation has been quite theoretical or quite academic. I mean, just kind of grounding it again in like where, where do you see something of hope or possibility or something that you're excited about in relation to your own exploration of some of these questions we've been facing? But, you know, kind of landing back on the land, I think maybe it's important.

Yeah. You know, just to your point there, Tim, I mean, absolutely. I think when we're asking those questions about what it is, you know, how it is that school systems kind of present values without presenting them. I mean, Corinna, I think, you know, what you were saying before about the difference between an explicit and a kind of insipid set of values is so important. And I think it's a really important thing for educators to be able to reflect on and to ask the question, In this seemingly valueless system that I'm working in, what are the values? To simply ask that question, what are the values and to what extent are they my values? And I, you know, I love that podcast that you did with, with Carrie Facer, Tim, because it, I think it reminds you that one of the main languages that is used to articulate values is actually time. And it doesn't feel sensible, right? You don't say, well, I mean, time is just time. How can it have some kind of ideology? Of course we know it does, right? Because time in school is articulated as capital. with a future return on investment, right? That's a pretty well-established argument. So I think that that is a really interesting practical question to ask educators to say, what are the values in the place that you work and how are those articulated in the how you spend your time? What is it that that system is prioritizing? What is it offering up as the main event of what is happening in your setting? And if it doesn't align with what you care about, what can you do about it? And I absolutely agree with your point. And, you know, the book I'm writing at the moment is called Schools Out Forever, and I'm absolutely on the same page with people like Stephen Ball who would say the school is a, the modern school is an intolerable institution because of why it's built the way it is. You know, it's a simple argument, right? In a finite world, if we are preparing people for extractive capitalism, that's probably not a great idea. And maybe it's a form of abuse, right? But that's not to say that we get rid of schools. And the reason for that, I think, is Because schools are so valuable to the very people who have the most to gain in those systems. You know, if well-meaning, ethically positioned teachers step away from schools, we know which actors will take their place. It will be private interests, it will be edtech, it will be people who still care about education because it's a big market for them. And that, you know, to me sort of rings the bell to say schools are absolutely worth fighting Because if we don't, then other interests that absolutely, you know, are not focused on the best futures of children are likely to encroach. So yeah, that would be the practical implication and the battle cry.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think for me it was because how can you as a teacher create spaces for liberation and active resistance against the current norms? Because I think that it's essential and crucial nowadays to be able to stimulate somebody's ability to think for themselves. To look at the world, to try to practice and engage with it, and then develop their own critical view. And I think teachers and/or people that work with education, they have such an important role here, you know, no matter what the structure of the institution tells them or the curricula or whatever is there. How can you create an environment where people can think for themselves? And how can you create an environment of active political imagination and resistance? Because then they can take the thinking that they develop there and then put it into practice into so many other areas of their lives. And I think school, I mean, education is one of the places where you can do that if you are an educator, even though it's not, I think, very easy. Otherwise, you're just continuously perpetuating a circus of monkeys, you know, like you're just continuously replicating something that is fundamentally broken. And then what's the meaning in that? You know, like, just like Pascal mentioned at the beginning, like the moment you start reflecting as an educator on your your purpose? Like, why are you doing this? You know, I think nobody would say, oh, I'm doing this because I want to perpetuate a certain norm of society. Like, they want to support human flourishing. And I think the way to do that is by stimulating freedom and active resistance.

Yeah. Thank you.

So as a recent grandmother, I have my first grandchild is now 3 weeks.

Congratulations.

I am really thinking of The education I gave my children and like, okay, what's my role now as a grandmother, especially with the rapidly changing world we're in and everything going in all sorts of directions and we don't know what the future is. So yeah, this is the main question I've been asking myself for the past 3 weeks, especially having Having a child born today is, is something that is really amazing to think of, even to make the decision to put another human being in, in the world we're in right now. When I'm driving in different countries, I can always guess, oh, that's a school. That building there, that's a school.

That's a school.

And I'm even 95% right because they have this quality even that they're projecting through the building. Where you can, you know, what's going on in there. They often look like prisons or like something close to that. And if I'm looking back to our topic here, the tools of anthropology, using observation of the particular, analyzing our real life, doing research through story, I think that's the most powerful way of seeing that building, seeing that prison, et cetera. It's also a powerful way as an actor of the system of identifying where the holes are, where I can do better and create some liberating education within the system. But also, so my PhD was on how teachers learn in communities through Wenger's work in communities of practice, et cetera. And I think it's admirable work, but it's not scalable. I was often told, oh yeah, that's great. Can't be done on a large scale, as if the fact that you can't do it on a large scale makes it unimportant or unimpactful. And this is something I really resist. I think that each person, each professional, each student that can liberate him or herself by finding and identifying these small spaces in the cracks of the wall to do this is something inspiring and alive. So I encourage it.

Amazing. That's beautiful. Thank you. And Zeynep?

Yeah, Pascal, I'm definitely resonating with what you're saying. 'Cause I was, my practical note has to do with, yes, schooling is not something we necessarily get to choose, but our education is always something that we can reclaim power over. What we learn, who we decide to become, and just applying that, you know, anthropological lens on ourselves. I find autoethnography to be one of the most powerful tools I've ever learned, and I would highly recommend to people to look at that process of looking back at you as a way of learning and as a way of making the, you know, the familiar strange enough that you can decide what is inherited versus what you're choosing for yourself. And yeah, Pascal, just also as you're saying, how do we educate our children? That's also not within the hands of schooling institutions. We're the ones, we're the parents. parents that can actually tell our children who they are. We can tell them you're divine beings who are here for a reason and the world is magical and recover the animacy and the beauty of the world for them by never presenting them with a view of the world that is dead matter, you know? So that's also in our hands to be able to actually make the world beautiful for our children and for ourselves in a way that we would have wanted to be taught at some point. And reclaiming all those little pieces of, of ourselves and our freedom through how we decide to be with the next generation. And so we don't need any institutions or any policy to start and to, to do this work. Very fortunately. Yeah. The work can start at home, the work of liberation, the work of love. And that's, that is what gives me the most hope. There's no one or nothing to wait for in order to start.

Amazing. Thank you so much. I mean, yeah, so beautiful. So interesting. I said, Like an overall constellation of where we've gone. I'm just absolutely lovely. Thank you so much for taking time for exploring this with me and beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. It was a lovely conversation. Learned a lot.

Take care, everyone.

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