HON-H 238 – Education Across Time and Culture

Sections offered SPRING 2022:

#10850

BRADLEY LEVINSON

TuTh 11:30 AM–12:45 PM

HU 111

CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; COLL (CASE) Global Civ & Culture credit

Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html

This course is designed for students to explore the nature of education as a perennial human endeavor, in its myriad historical and cultural forms, including contemporary mass schooling. Three fundamental sets of questions animate the course:

Why do human beings educate? How did education evolve along with culture as humanity’s unique adaptive quality? What range of purposes does education seem to serve, and how do those purposes vary according to historical and social context?
How and where do human beings educate? What are the variety of educational forms and practices that have been developed by human societies, including modern schools, and how might these change in the future?
How and why do modern schools exist, what purposes do they serve, and how do they reflect the political forces and cultural contexts where they function?

In addition to these substantive questions, and the answers provided to them primarily through anthropological, but also historical and sociological research, the course explores these social science disciplines as unique lenses for educational inquiry, and further develops expository writing skills. Beginning with considerations about human evolution and broad changes in forms of human sociality, this course explores the ways that the purposes of education relate to their unique cultural conceptions and contexts, as well as to social challenges that societies have faced historically. The course ends with an exploration of the most salient and pressing challenges facing societies across the globe, and the kinds of educational responses such challenges may require.

As a result of completing course reading and writing assignments and participating in classroom discussions, students will:

Demonstrate their familiarity with, and understanding of, a variety of societies and cultures’ means of educating the young
Compare and contrast these different cultures’ means of educating, and develop an understanding of the complex relationship between local cultural conceptions of education, the state’s role in adjudicating political forces and providing mass schooling, and the growing influence of global policy actors
Further develop their ability to write analytically, critically, and imaginatively about education and culture.