Many faces of the concept of culture (and education)

Introduction

The concepts of education and culture have been closely connected. For example, education is often defined as reproduction of culture when novices join it. As newborn children grow up, they join and contribute to the existing culture. Thus, as children learn to speak their native language, this language continues its existence. Furthermore, adults may also join existing cultural practices unfamiliar to them. For example, an adult may learn a new profession, which at the same time supports the existence of this cultural professional practice. Through newcomers joining existing cultural practices, culture rejuvenates, spreads, and maintains itself. In this regard, education is often seen as a purposefully organized process to serve this rejuvenation of the culture.

However, this common view of culture as a set of distinguished practices that people can join is only one among other possible views. Alternative views of culture may generate alternative definitions of education and its relationships with culture and the reverse is true as well. Alternative definitions of education generate alternative definition of culture. The relationship between culture and education is apparently transactional. The culture and education seem to create a whole or an “attractor” (a term from a chaos theory). That is why we call it “gestalt approaches.”

We have noticed in educational practice and literature, ¹ at least four distinct approaches to culture (and, thus, to education), including the traditional one described above, which we call “culture as pattern.” Some scholars have started to argue that culture “does not have internal territory” (Bakhtin, 1999) and that it exists only on a boundary with another culture. They see cultural contact as that what creates culture. We call this approach “culture as boundary.” Other scholars define culture as authorship, being constantly on the move, constantly authorially transcending its own given (Matusov, 2011a). Yet, some other scholars view culture as a critical dialog that deconstructs anything given (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012; Matusov & von Duyke, 2010; Matusov, von Duyke, & Kayumova, 2015; von Duyke & Matusov, 2015). In each of the four approaches to culture, we will consider the notion of education and the relationships between the two concepts. Although all four approaches to culture are paradigmatically distinct from each other, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive—we will discuss this issue of the complex relationship among the four gestalt approaches to culture and, thus, to education, in our conclusion. In addition, we will discuss the ontology behind these four gestalt approaches. As a by-product of our analysis of culture and education, we critically deconstruct the concept of meaning making as deeply dialogic process, separating it from its many masks that are mistakenly identified with it in some of the discussed concepts of culture.

Culture as pattern

Conventionally, culture is defined as a particular stable way of acting, behaving, doing knowing, and mediating things and relating to and communicating with other people (Morra & Smith, 2006; Oswell, 2006; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). An approach to culture that focuses on these particular stable practices is what we call “culture as pattern.” Culture as pattern can be described at diverse social levels like society, groups, or even individuals. Any society is a culture. Thus, Vygotsky defined culture as mediation of tools and signs (Vygotsky, 1978). Any group is a culture. Any person is a culture. For example, a particular stable way (i.e. pattern) of communication may involve a national language, dialect, group slang, or personal speaking mannerisms. Although particular ways of acting, behaving, doing, knowing, mediating, relating, and communicating are recognized as stable, they do not need to be actually static, but may change with time (Rogoff, 2003). What is important here is this particular way is recognized as a pattern or a shape. A shapeless, fluid way of acting would stop being recognized as a culture.

However, it must be noted that the presented view of culture as pattern is an external view—it is a view on culture as pattern outside of the culture itself. Internally, culture as pattern cannot be perceived by its participants as culture at all. Participants of a culture perceive it as nature, necessity, logic, rationality, norm, tradition, appropriateness, rightness, standard, moral integrity, godliness, and so on. For them, there is nothing arbitrary in it. For example, in Russian fairytales animals speak in “human tongue” (that happens to be Russian, of course). Slavic people call Germans “немцы,” which literally means “people who can’t speak.” And Ancient Greeks called non-Greek-speaking people “barbarians,” mimicking their incomprehensive sounds “bar-bar-bar.” Paraphrasing famous joke about Ancient Greeks told by Bakhtin (1986), “Culture as pattern does not know the most important thing about itself – that it is culture.” Anything that does not fit its (cultural) shape is viewed in this approach as deformed, out of shape, deficient, abnormal, pervert, ignorant, incomplete, immoral, sinful, inappropriate, transgressive, incorrect, illogical, irrational, unreasonable, incomprehensible, dissonant, dissident, unamiable, unpleasant, repugnant, threatening, ugly, weird, odd, crippled, queer, offensive, evil, or just plainly wrong. People are measured on scales of these cultural patterns, perceived as essential human qualities, and accordingly sorted into categories where those who don’t match them need to be “developed,” fixed, and even segregated and/or restrained.

Education is viewed as a process of shaping people to allow them to participate in a culture as pattern. Student is viewed as material and/or an object of socialization, aculturalization, and cultural shaping. Thus, in Slavic languages the word “education”—“образование” (in Russian)—literally means “forming” or “shaping,” putting students into a particular shape or pattern. On a broader scale, in the culture as pattern approach, education involves socialization of newcomers into a given cultural shape, in a particular recognizable way of behaving, acting, doing, knowing, communicating, and relating. While being still outside of this shape, a person is viewed as deficient. Thus, this type of vision of education is heavily based on a deficit model focusing on how to eliminate deficits in students to fit them to the given cultural shapes. It expects from the newcomers to recognize and embody cultural (internally perceived as correct) patterns of behaving, acting, doing, knowing, communicating, and relating—patterns unfamiliar to the newcomers. This pattern recognition can be explicit, deliberate, conscious or not, i.e. implicit, undeliberate, or even subconscious. The cultural patterns do not need to be visible or noticeable for the participants to be socialized into.

Embodied cultural patterns of socialization create new affordances for human actions and relations (Gibson, 1979). It is not people who act on their environment but the environment that is newly shaped by a socialized perception acts on people. For example, in many modern Western cultural communities, when I (the first author) suddenly, out of blue, out of any context, move a small object to a close proximity of another person, this person will take this object as if it was offered to him/her. In this case, the environment acts on the person, which is then interpreted by the person as the object “being offered.” The object that I am moving closer to the person almost cries to being taken, like a cake cries “eat me” in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The actor is not the person but the object itself because of the embodied cultural pattern of action. Similarly, in conventional Western school, students will say “four,” when a teacher asks them, out of any context, “What is two plus two?” The same students may not reply “four” in another context, outside of school, instead being puzzled what a questioner may mean by this question with obvious answer out of any meaningful context (Matusov, 2015a).

Thus, paradoxically, despite a frequent emphasis of the importance of meaning making in education (e.g. Bruner, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978), within the culture as pattern approach, education does not need meaning-making process, defined by Bakhtin (1986) as a tense dialogic relationship between a person raising an interested question and a serious answer, responding to the addressee. Instead, pattern recognition and pattern embodiment can be enough to survive, live by, mediate, and communicate, thus, masking meaning making. As modern robotics shows, pattern recognition can be based on the following three main principles: (1) pragmatics, (2) probabilistics, and (3) complexity (Markoff, 2015). Complexity is defined by a chaotic self-organizing system (i.e. chaos shaped by structure), in which diverse numerous, ideally infinite by number and diversity, attractors can probabilistically emerge through a big database of the accumulated trials and errors. The dominate attractor that generates many successes is the recognized pattern. Embodiment of a pattern is the same process of pattern recognition but at the level of action and not just perception.

There is a complex relationship between meaning making and pattern recognition, intensively studied in psychology (Reed, 1972) and robotics (especially in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation) (Markoff, 2015), or even a new pattern creation, which are still not meaning making. Not all creation requires meaning making. In contrast to claims made by an existential philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (1972), pattern recognition and creation can beautifully approximate and, thus, mask outcomes of the meaning-making process, while not really becoming meaning-making process. For example, the IBM Deep Blue computer program that beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997 created innovative moves and strategies that were not based on meaning making. A modern smart machine can recognize natural voice, human face, handwriting; it can transcribe human speech to text; it can drive a car; it can beat the best human players in a chess game; it can calculate better than humans; and so on without engaging in meaning-making process. Some, scholars and Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts even call for replacement of human teachers with smart guiding machines (Chang, Lee, Chao, Wang, & Chen, 2010). However, pattern recognition, made by indifferent smart machines, is animated only by biases brought by humans who define for the machines what outcomes of the machine trials should be labeled as undesirable (i.e. failure of a trial) and what outcomes of the machine trials should be labeled as desirable (i.e. success of a trial). This desirability of certain outcomes is imposed human subjectivity on the smart machines. We argue that this imposed subjectivity is still not meaning making, but it reveals a hidden human-machine hybridity and the augmentative nature of smart machines. The smart machines look more smart and more human than they really are. Without human subjectivity, smart machines cannot develop smart patterns, i.e. they cannot judge what is desirable and what not. Smart machine can write interesting music as a pattern of sounds liked by humans. However, understanding that this pattern of sounds is music and that it is interesting music is a culturally and biologically biased human endeavor. Smart machines based on pattern recognition and creation are animated by human biases. Thus, as it is now, pattern recognition by smart machines is both similar and different to pattern recognition common among animals, including humans.

Thus, in the culture as pattern approach, education is viewed as “closed and open socialization” ² (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012) into of a given cultural practice or a cultural “community of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991)—a culturally biased pattern recognition and creation. This process of education does not require and is not necessarily based on meaning making (i.e. it may or may not). We want to challenge the notion of “community of learners” to see how much it really requires meaning making if at all. Personally, currently we are agnostic about this issue that demands more investigation because the notion of “community of learners” is very polysemic and different educators committed to this notion may or may not value genuine meaning making (but rather socialization based on pattern recognition) despite their own claims (Matusov, von Duyke, & Han, 2012). This education process is both similar to and different from smart machine’s pattern recognition and creation. The two are similar because both the education process and the smart machine learning are based on pattern recognition and creation. But they are different because subjectivity (i.e. what is desirable and undesirable, success and failure) is imposed and external to smart machines, while it is inherent and internal to human participants in cultural practices. In this educational approach, in addition to and as a part of a task of pattern recognition/creation, an important task is learning subjectivity. This is what Vygotsky probably meant by “internalization” of cultural biases, desires, motives, and values from the society into individual (Vygotsky, 1978) and not just learning about them. In the artificial intelligence of the smart machines, pragmatics is imposed and remains external to the machines themselves. In contrast, in education as (closed and/or open) socialization, pragmatics is learned and becomes an inherent part of the participants themselves—their subjectivity, their biases, their desires, and their values.

Finally, we are turning to briefly discuss the complexity of the educational approach of culture as pattern. Like in the field of artificial intelligence, we discussed above, education as socialization is torn between two major approaches. One is the algorithmic top-down pattern-recognition approach of procedural knowledge that leads to the desired outcomes. This algorithmic approach is often decontextualized, focusing on atomized, self-contained mobile modular blocks of information, operations, and functions that can be combined and recombined into a complex activity. This procedural pattern-recognition approach to education as socialization, common in many conventional schools, is based on explication of the practice by abstracting essential self-contained blocks of information, operations, and functions, which are meaning and context free. This hierarchical algorithmic pattern-recognition approach has failed in the field of artificial intelligence (Markoff, 2015), but it is still well and alive in the field of education. However, in both fields, it creates problems of inadaptability and insensitivity to the context. This problem is recognized in the field of education as an issue of transfer (Bransford & Schwartz, 2001).

Pattern recognition and creation is the second approach to education as socialization into culture as shape. It is based on (1) pragmatics, (2) probabilistics, and (3) complexity. It is an essentially experiential and situated approach. It is alien to the procedural approach to education as socialization. It involves redundancy of many trials and errors in diverse contexts. It produces new subjectivity with new biases, new desires, and new motives. However, like any education as socialization process it is indifferent to deep bottomless understanding and meaning-making process and, thus, it is highly monologic.

Yet, in some versions, this education as socialization can be creative, which is similar to smart machines. It can create new interesting patterns and it can modify shapes of cultural practices and ways of being and even create new subjectivities. In these versions, the outcomes of education are not predictable because newcomers may contribute to the emergence and/or transformation of new personal and societal cultures. In those types of education, this unpredictability of educational outcomes is recognized as legitimate. Yet, we argue, this creation does not require and is not based on meaning making.

Culture as boundary

In contrast to the culture as pattern approach that focuses on “internal territory” of culture as a set of particular pattern of behavior, action, communication, relations, values, and so on, understanding culture as boundary focuses on the relationship between cultures as the central defining attribute of this concept:

One must not … imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial whole, having boundaries but also having internal territory. The realm of culture has no internal territory: it is entirely distributed along the boundaries, boundaries pass everywhere, through its every aspect, the systematic unity of culture extends into the very atoms of cultural life, it reflects like the sun in each drop of that life. Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries: in this is its seriousness and its significance; abstracted from boundaries, it loses its soul, it becomes empty, arrogant, it disintegrates and dies. (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 301)

The culture as boundary approach shifts from the deficit model of the culture as pattern approach to the celebration of diversity model. Pluralism and tolerance are recognized and valued here. The quality gives place to equality (e-quality, the root of these terms is the same). In the deficit model, a cultural other is viewed as deformed and deficient, i.e. someone who misses some important quality defining the essence of the human being. In the celebration of diversity model, a cultural other is viewed as legitimate and equal human being with alternative but equal quality. This is the approach of cultural relativism. It promotes juxtaposition but resists cultural blending, merger, assimilation, or dialog. It is an approach of keeping cultural boundaries clear. It is an approach of cultural preservation, restoration, and conservation. It is an approach of cultural museums and reservations. It is an approach of appreciation of diverse national cuisines and diverse tastes. Nothing can be argued about that.

This spatial, topological approach to the notion of culture is a bit static. It does not accommodate time in it, nor meaning change, either internal or external, i.e. it does not accomodate either the internal change of developmental transformation or the external change of transformative interaction of the bordering cultures. The celebration model resists any change. It is a culturally conservative approach. It accuses the culture as pattern approach as being expansionist, colonialist, and imperial, disrespectful to a cultural other. However, ironically the conservation drive of this approach creates a time dimension of the conservation of the past in this otherwise spatial approach.

At the same time, this approach is not essentialist. It also recognizes a ubiquitous internal diversity within any recognized culture: both historical and contemporary. This introduces a time dimension of the future liberation as it may become dissatisfied with the current situation of intolerance and actively try to promote diversity, tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism in the society and people. It tries to make cultural boundaries visible and recognizable as cultural. It fights for human rights, gay rights, women rights, workers’ rights, minority rights, children’s rights, and so on. The two time tendencies of the culture as boundary approach—conservationist and liberalist—are at odds with each other. The conservationist tendency calls for acceptance of the tradition and status quo with their whatever illiberal attitudes, values, and practices. Meanwhile the liberalist tendency calls for promoting human rights and pluralism among diverse cultural groups and people in general, including the right to transform or preserve any recognized culture.

In the culture as boundary approach, education is viewed as contact, tolerance, pluralism, celebration of cultural diversity, and social justice. Student is recognized as very rich and already competent member of his/her cultural community, full of “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992), skills, and values, ready to be expanded. This educational approach is more known in social sciences and humanities than in the exact sciences like math and natural sciences although it can be probably pushed there as well (e.g. studying alternative indigenous medicine, agriculture, navigation, etc.). In this approach, education is about learning about boundaries in and among cultures at social and personal levels, respecting and celebrating these boundaries, and making sure that diverse cultures may have equal rights. This learning starts with studying contrasts among cultures and revealing their cultural arbitrariness. This denaturalizes cultural practices and values and disrupts common sense and the existing rationality. It acknowledges, promotes, and defends diversity of learning paths and learning (always provisional) outcomes. It rebels against any educational standards—either instructional or curricular. It is against any measuring or testing people because of their unalienated rights to be different.

In this educational approach, agreement is viewed neither as a desired nor as a possible endpoint. Rather agreement is viewed as a pragmatic artifact for a situation when the existing differences are not important for some particular pragmatic goal. Consciousnesses of people are viewed as essentially opaque and never fully transparent. A bird’s eye’s view of consciousnesses is impossible (Bakhtin, 1999; Matusov, 2015b). The difference between the teachers and the students is not seen in terms of quantitates of knowledge: the teachers know more while the students know less. Rather consciousnesses of the teachers and students are always qualitatively different and remain being qualitatively different while students are getting familiarity with studied practices.

This educational approach of culture as boundary does not necessarily promote meaning-making process. Instead, it involves recognition of contrasts existing on the boundaries and respecting them—thus, masking meaning making with the recognition of these cultural contrasts and boundaries. Moreover, in contrast to the culture as pattern approach that views other cultural biases as illegitimate distortions of reality, the culture as boundary approach recognizes and accepts biases as such but, paradoxically, it again naturalizes them, conceptualizing them as diverse cultural “tastes,” through its reluctance to put any authorial, biased, evaluative judgment on them. If the culture as pattern approach is dogmatic, the culture as boundary is relativistic. This makes both of them monologic as they refuse to accept legitimacy of an authorial evaluative-biased judgment, “… it should be noted that both relativism and dogmatism equally exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialog, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism)” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 69).

Culture as authorship

The previous two gestalt approaches view culture as something more or less stable—as a pattern or a boundary. This fact leads to education that in its nature is reproductive and conservationist. Students are often viewed as becoming competent consumers of culture. In contrast, the third gestalt approach is focused on culture making. It defines culture as active transcendence of the given—culture, society, nature, self—recognized by others and/or self. Culture as authorship is constantly on the move of transcendence of the given recognized and valued by others in dialog. It is like a shark described by a comedian Woody Allen ³ : when authorship stops, culture dies. Similarly, a Soviet philosopher Bibler defined “a person of culture,” someone who actively and constantly authors the culture. Bibler saw the goal of education in promoting “a person of culture” ⁴ —an active and self-conscious culture-maker (Berlyand, 2009; Bibler, 2009). Here, the culture is defined by its authorship. Authorship involves self-actualization and self-fulfillment (Arendt, 1958; Maslow, 1943). A readymade culture, focused on by the other two gestalt approaches, has only a trace of the authorship: the fact that it was created, in itself is not a sign of culture, nor culture itself. It is like a love letter, which is a sign of love but not love itself. In contrast to Bibler, we argue that authorial culture making is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human nature (Matusov, 2011a). Every person is an authorial culture maker. The life of every person is culture making. This biographical cultural authorship makes every person unique. However, we agree with Vladimir Bibler that our current society does not recognize and appreciate this aspect of the human nature. The past and present societies have been focused on readymade culture—either suppressing authorship or recognizing it as highly exceptional, elite, requiring a special talent and authorization. Given traditions, norms, patterns, rules, techniques, stability, universality, and standards have been valued rather than their authorial transcendence. This tendency may be changing as the smart machines start replacing people working as smart machines and, thus, creativity becomes an important and growing economic commodity (Florida, 2012; Ford, 2015; Mitra, 2013; Pink, 2005, 2009; Robinson & Aronica, 2009; Zhao, 2009, 2012).

Elsewhere we discussed creativity as a dialogic and eventful process (Matusov, 2011a; Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2016). Creative authorship of culture making is dialogic for several reasons. First of all, it is dialogic because it occurs on a boundary of readymade cultures as its material for transcendence. Creative authorship involves “the third space” (Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995) and “creolization” (Matusov, St. Julien, & Hayes, 2005), when the cultural boundary is perceived as a tension to be resolved. Thus, Gutierrez and her colleagues described a classroom situation that was full of tension between the teacher’s official school culture and minority students’ counter-culture. The third space emerged where students’ counter-culture was fertilized by the teacher’s official culture, which created a new culture. We argue that this process occurs every day on much smaller and much less visible scales. The second aspect of dialogization of cultural authorship occurs at the level of recognition of an author’s transcendence of the given as important and meaningful by other people and/or by the author him/her/themselves (in contrast to its recognition as a mistake, distortion, transgression, crime, sin, and so on, i.e. violation of culture as a readymade pattern, see the first section). This recognition involves a perception of a breakdown of and with the given, which is also viewed as deliberate and, thus, authorial. The third aspect involves evaluation of the valence of the transcendence of the given as good or bad, helpful or harmful, and so on. For example, Adolph Hitler’s creative politics of the 1930s was well recognized as such but it was judged by many people as evil. This dramatic example also shows that evaluation of creativity can be contested (as well as its recognition) and that it may change with time, which is also a characteristic of dialogism: being testable and contestable forever (Morson, 2004). The fourth related dialogic aspect of creative authorship of culture making involves meaning making as it provokes questioning/addressing the authorship and replying to it (Bakhtin, 1986). The authorship provokes questions among many people coming from many different domains of human activity and diverse discourses. This makes creative authorship of culture making heterodiscursive and heteroglossive: involving diverse discourses and diverse voices (Matusov, 2011b). Thus, Matusov (2011a) described his innovative learning word game of recognizing smaller words within a given word with an elementary school Latino boy and Latina girl as his creative transformation of a meaningless language art homework. Their discussion of the word “exit” led to diverse discourses involving a discussion of the boy’s complex and dramatic family relations; whether the word “exit” is a compound word; what are “morphemes”; and a modification of the initial game into a search for morphemes in the words that were immediately available in the children’s environment (beyond working on their homework). Finally, the fifth dialogic aspect of the creative authorship of culture making borders with ethics. It involves the author’s taking responsibility for his/her/their authorship. Creative authorship of culture making is also essentially eventful. Authorship is always dramatic, ethically charged, and risky because, while breaking with the predictable and certain given, it creates unforeseeable consequences and a new reality, disrupting lives of other people. These consequences and reality can and often are challenged by others (and the author her/him/themselves) demanding the author’s response (as in responsibility) (Bakhtin, 1993). For example, in the case above, some of Matusov’s undergraduate students, future teachers, criticized him for his distorting the official homework, making a serious activity fun, not promoting the will in the children to endure through the tedious homework (similar to many adult activities that wait for the children in their adult lives), violating the official educational standards, making learning outcomes unpredictable, not staying on the task of studying language art (heterodiscoursia), and developing dependency on an adult’s creativity in the children. Matusov had to take responsibility for his creative authorship of his pedagogical culture making by responding to this criticism and engaging his students in an axiological discussion of their educational values (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2016). Thus, the culture as authorship approach is essentially dialogic, finally involving an authentic meaning-making process, defined by the five aspects above.

In this approach to culture as authorship, education is viewed as authorial culture making rather than reproducing the given readymade culture and society. During this autodidact authorial education, a student learns readymade culture through his/her creative authorship of culture making and transcending the readymade culture. For example, a child learns his/her mother tongue through his/her authorial communication and activities with the family members, peers, and strangers. The informal guidance that various people provide to the child is similarly authorial,

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated –overpopulated– with the intentions of others. Expropriating I, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process … As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other … The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation [i.e., animation of somebody else’s word with one’s own creative spirit – the authors], the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language … but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 294)

Authorial education is always unpredictable in several aspects: whether it happens, when it happens, with whom, about what, what outcomes will come out of it, what sense to make out of it, by whom, and, finally, whether it is good or not—questions, embedded in dialog, that define meaning-making process (Bakhtin, 1986). Authorial education is a constructive praxis, using Aristotelian terms. Aristotle described praxis as an activity, goal, and quality of which emerge as a part of the activity itself and do not preexist it. This vision of education is at odds with the conventional vision of education as reproduction of readymade culture (culture as pattern and culture as boundary), where the goal and quality of education are preset by the educational authorities—poiesis, in Aristotelian terms (Carr, 2006).

Although, authorial education, with its focus on creativity and transcendence, evaluation of valences, intersubjectivity and ethics, promotes meaning making, we sense something deeply troubling in this educational approach. It seems to lack a deconstructive critical look at itself. For example, a California high school social studies teacher Ron Jones (1972) described his pedagogical experiment, in which his students learned about totalitarian regimes through a simulative recreation of such totalitarian movement that was called “The third wave.” The participating students quickly became involved in creative authorship of a totalitarian culture making, assisted and guided by the teacher-führer. The recognition and evaluation of the participants’ creative transcendence in this emerging totalitarian movement was established by power to expel, suppress, or oppress the dissent. Their vast learning was highly authorial, genuinely meaningful, engaging, active, participatory, creative, relational, ontological, eventful, unpredictable, unique, emotional, experiential, reflective, problem-based (problem defining and problem solving), and personal. It was a genuine praxis. It involved a lot of heteroglossia and heterodiscoursia. However, at the same time, their learning was arguably abusive, closed-minded, uncritical, and irresponsible (if not even criminal). The issues of responsibility, critique, deconstruction, consideration of, and open dialog with various alternative and contrarian perspectives were not a part of this authorial education.

Culture as critical dialog

Culture as critical dialog involves testing readymade and emerging ideas, approaches, worldviews, perspectives, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values against diverse alternative possible ideas, approaches, worldviews, perspectives, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. This testing is multifaceted: intellectual, ontological, ethical, and so on. Ideas can be tested not just by reasoning (i.e. intellectually) but also by living them and their consequences through (i.e. ontologically), taking responsibility for them (i.e. ethically). For example, when we presented our undergraduate students, future teachers, with our teaching dilemma of whether their teacher (we) should call on only students who raise their hands versus also randomly students who do not raise their hands, students discussed PROs and CONs of this issue and then voted for the teacher’s right only to call on students who raise their hands. However, by the mid-term, when we reflected on our class, many students raised their concerns that only a minority of the students were speaking, which was recognized as being detrimental for the whole class. This forced us (both the teacher and the students) to reconsider the class policy and to shift to a third policy of “the 5^th Amendment” ⁶ (Shor, 1996)—the policy that was rejected initially, during our purely intellectual discussion at the beginning of the class. Students apparently shifted from prioritizing their comfort to prioritizing the quality of educational dialog, enriched by diverse voices, in the class. They changed their values and relationship with the others and self. The testing of the diverse policies, ideas, desires, and values was multifaceted in this case.

Of course, it is impossible to test everything and all the time. Rather, in this approach, “Truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (Morson, 2004, p. 319) and thus, although not everything is tested at any given moment (which makes a provisional authority possible in this approach) (Matusov, 2007), anything can become a subject of testing in the future. In the culture as critical dialog, everything is legitimately questionable and everybody is legitimately answerable. Nothing is a taboo. This approach prevents dogmatism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism, but also relativism.

The critical dialog, or “internally ⁷ persuasive discourse” (Bakhtin, 1991), can be at small and big scale—the latter may include the Big Dialog unfolding in the history of the mankind (Bibler, 1991). It may involve diverse ideas of the immediate participants but also diverse ideas presented in the literature expressing voices of the past and by outsiders. These broader participants can be full members, peripheral members, and outside members of the targeted discourse and/or practice. The dialog can be synchronous, asynchronous, and even internal with imaginary participants. Any closure of such dialog is always temporary. It is unfinalized and incomplete. It is open and not self-contained. It is spread in time, space, people, discourses, and practices.

Thus, critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, resisting to advocate and promote any particular value—even so attractive values as tolerance, pluralism, equality, justice, universal human rights, critical thinking, and so on (Matusov & Lemke, 2015). Any construction that it develops is a by-product of its deconstruction and, thus, remains provisional because it can become a subject of a new deconstruction. Critical dialog searches for boundaries of truth, any truth. Even deconstruction itself (i.e. too much critique, ill-timed critique, mean critique, manipulative critique, or even critique as such) can become a focus of legitimate critique. This is what it means to be self-critical. It is based on doubts and not on beliefs. Critical dialog generates authorship of the authorship, praxis of praxis (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012), and, thus, transcendence of transcendence. While it transcends the culturally given, it also transcends its own transcendence through its critique. While it generates a new positive given as its by-products, it consecutively critiques it through dialog with others. It is always open for alternative positions, challenges, frustrations, and surprises.

From the culture as critical dialog approach, education is aiming at a critical examination of the self, life, world, and society (Plato, 1997). This goal of education resonates, but does not overlap, with Socrates’ problematic motto, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The reason why education as critical examination may reject Socrates’ motto is because education itself may consider its own legitimate limitation: sometimes the unexamined life is worth living, the examined live is not worth living (Kukathas, 2003), and/or examination may not be a priority in a good life. For example, when we see a person ready to step out on a road without checking for approaching cars, it may be not a good moment to educate this person but to save him or her, treating him or her as an object of physical force rather than a subject partner of a critical dialog about examination of life.

Education as critical examination involves the suspension of beliefs and the hypothetical “what if” orientation. Thus, Marjanovic-Shane (2016) contrasts drama and play education to dialogic pedagogy approaches. She argues that in drama and play education, participants are required to suspend their disbeliefs to live in an imaginary playworld often constructed by educators. The participants should assume the playful orientation of “as if,” to invite each other in this imaginary playworld construction. Any doubt in this imaginary playworld construction is detrimental for drama education. In contrast, in dialogic pedagogy, participants are expected to suspend their beliefs in order to test their and each other’s dear opinions, worldviews, attitudes, desires, and values. Their orientation of “what if” involves envisioning hypothetical worlds of diverse possibilities and their consequences to be tested. Marjanovic-Shane argues that while a spoilsport is absolutely illegitimate in drama and play education (cf. Huizinga, 2009, pp. 11–12), a spoilsport, dissident, heretic is the most desirable role for participants in dialogic pedagogy. Of course, by a spoilsport we mean an unlimited, self-critical, spoilsport deconstructor, ultimate devil advocate, and not a dogmatic dictator, who is not critical to him/herself. Any authoritarian spoilsport is essentially constructive, rigidly constructive, banning doubts about his or her new construction; although his or her construction can be an alternative to a mainstream construction. Also, the spoilsport we are talking about here, as desired in education for critical examination, is not one who constantly generates alternative ideas to juxtapose them without testing them in critical dialog. Thus, although education may be an aspect of many practices, it is a practice in itself, since the other practices prioritize construction over deconstruction. In contrast to the authorial approach, education is not merely praxis, defining its own goal and quality, but it is praxis of praxis, constantly examining these provisional and always diverse goals and qualities (Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2012).

However, paradoxically, the deconstructive priority of education, emerging from the culture as critical dialog approach, negates itself. It is because defining the purpose of education is a part of education itself and cannot be predefined by educators or educational philosophers like us. It is only a legitimate business of the students themselves and not of the teachers and/or the society. Students may assume different provisional goals for their education, which may not necessary be critical and deconstructive. Educational philosophical pluralism and freedom is absolutely necessary (but not sufficient) for engaging in critical dialog. The pedagogical authority of the teacher is to legitimately impose his or her educational philosophy on his/her student that the student must have the right to reject. For example, in our classes, some students may insist on conventional educational philosophy of transmission of knowledge, stemming from the culture as pattern approach. ⁸ We follow their insistence as an ontological test of their educational desire. We invite these students to critically reflect on their own experiences before and after their switch from education as critical examination to education as socialization, which is in itself a part of a critical dialog. Thus, conventional education becomes a test of their desired educational philosophy. Even if they finish up still selecting conventional educational philosophy of transmission of knowledge, their engagement in critically examining and making their own informed authorial judgments is in the spirit of the education as critical examination. However, students may refuse to engage in comparison and testing educational philosophies, which probably would lead to a legitimate educational divorce between the teacher practicing education as critical examination and the student practicing education as socialization (or other alternative philosophy). Still, education as critical examination requires this overall democratic regime of political-educational freedom and pluralism to flourish.

Conclusion: Four faces of culture and education

What is really culture (and education)?

What are we trying to say with the presented typology of the four diverse gestalt concepts of culture and education? Are we trying to say that the last type of approach to culture and education as critical dialog is good and real, while the rest of the approaches are the existing misconceptions and bad? Or is it some kind of the Hegelian developmental progression of the concept of culture: (1) culture in itself, (2) culture for itself, (3) culture in making, and (4) culture for others? Or do they belong to some diverse domains, in which they can legitimately be activated and applied?

In our view, although all these interpretations of our typology of concept of culture and education are possible and interesting, they are not ours here. We draw a different conclusion from our typology. We see it as diverse social constructions and meaning making that actively describe, construct, normalize, and prescribe social reality: practices, and discourses (and the educational practice)—sometimes in pure forms and sometimes in hybrids. We see our contribution here in making these diverse approaches to culture visible by articulating, contrasting, and evaluating them. We want to engage them in critical dialog, i.e. to publically test their desirability and mutual relationship (i.e. juxtaposing, complimentary, adversarial, dichotomous) for us, as educators and social scientists. Thus, for us, culture is whenever people use the term “culture” for themselves or for others and whatever they mean by their discursive or pragmatic use. Thus, for example, in the culture as pattern approach, insiders may not use the term culture at all—for them their practices and discourses are normal and natural. They may not think or feel that they have culture. Something just feels normal or perverse. However, for outsiders, these insiders do have culture because of their particular ways (patterns) of doing, relating, behaving, communicating, acting, valuing, and so on. In this paper, we have positioned ourselves in a role of anthropologists, who do not want to essentialize the subject of study—we refuse to address the question, “What really is culture?” We use the metaphor of “many faces” because we have noticed that discourse and practice of use of the term of culture differ, which is especially important for discourse on education. Nothing unifies these faces beyond the term that participants use. This semantic “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) of the notion of culture (and education) creates tensions among the participants addressing its diverse faces.

In our view, the presented typology of the four diverse approaches to the concept of culture represents the architectonics of the societal desire (see Table 1). In the culture as pattern approach, the patterns of doing, behaving, relating, communicating, valuing, and so on are important because these patterns enable the participants to survive biologically, psychologically, and socially as individuals and as groups and allow them to fabricate the ever-expanding ever-enveloping human world of their liking which includes artifacts, tools, practices, desires, relationships, architecture, knowledge, skills, subjectivities, behaviors, and so on (cf. Arendt, 1958). In the culture as boundary approach, the focus is on getting along with cultural Other by establishing the relationship of tolerance and making clear boundaries with the Other. It is the “live and let live” attitude. It is about both preservation cultural lifestyle and tolerance to others. In the culture as authorship approach, making a difference—i.e. recognized transcendence of the given—is prioritized as a societal desire. Culture is viewed as alive process of active culture making. Culture making is different from fabrication (Arendt, 1958), because the latter is reproduction of culture and poiesis while the former is praxis. Paraphrasing Aristotle’s (Aristotle & Lord, 2013, 1252b29) famous phrase about Ancient Greek polis, “Creativity may come into existence for the sake of survival and fabrication, but remains in existence for the sake of making a difference.” In the culture as critical dialog approach, the societal desire is on search for truth, with the focus on “search for” as a never-ending dialog.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Multiple faces of culture (and education).

	Culture as pattern	Culture as boundary	Culture as authorship	Culture as critical dialog
Architectonics of societal desire	Survival and fabrication of things, desires, and people	Getting along with the cultural Other	Making a difference	Search for truth
Education	Socialization	Tolerance	Creativity	Critical examination
Relationship between education and culture	Reproduction of culture	Recognition and celebration of cultures	Culture making	Deconstruction of culture
Student	Object of shaping	Funds of knowledge	Author	Spoilsport
Meaning making	Not necessarily, pattern recognition is masking meaning making	Not necessarily, recognition of cultural contrasts-boundaries is masking meaning making	Yes	Yes
Critical stand	No	No	No	Yes
Ontology	Necessity and utility-based (knowledge- and skill-based)	Multicultural liberalism based	Agency based	Leisure based

Currently, in the majority, if not all, mainstream societies, the conventional formal education is defined by the culture as pattern approach, focusing on reproduction of culture and society through socialization that may take diverse forms (e.g. transmission of knowledge, discovery learning, apprenticeship). Authorship and critical dialogic education often remain in small secluded oases often for the elite (Anyon, 1980; Davydov, 2008). This fact begs for its explanation. We agree with many scholars (Arendt, 1958; Mitra, 2013; Zhao, 2009) that the nature of the conventional formal education links with the ontology of the society: its economy, its political organization, the organization of its institutes, its conventional practices, its conventional discourses, and so on. The current ontology of the society, focusing on survival, necessities, and fabrication, is heavily based on using people as smart machines so they can arrive at preset objectives, often in dynamic and ill-defined environments. The latter fact makes the people-machines smart. Thus, these practices are organized as poiesis and education prepares people for participation in poiesis. Education itself becomes poiesis.

At the same time, the modern society is not static and is constantly changing with even more accelerating speed of these changes. That is why poiesis of the ontology of the modern society has not been omnipresent. Thus, changing society, which has embraced and values its own changes, always needs a minority of authors, who will actively and creatively transcend the societal practices—its “creative class” (Florida, 2012; Mellander, 2013; Zhao, 2012). This makes the modern conventional formal education also interested in the culture as authorship approach to address its marginal need for producing active makers of culture on a systematic basis. This type of education is aimed at preparing its students for practices defined as praxis and, thus, education itself is organized as praxis. Conventional formal education has always managed to develop enclaves of the education for authorship on a systematic basis (this observable empirical fact waits for it investigation ⁹ ). These marginal enclaves seem an inherent and ubiquitous part of the conventional education and are different from other enclaves of innovative education that are alien to the nature of the conventional formal education (e.g. democratic education of Summerhill school or Sudbury Valley School). The education for socialization and education for authorship have somewhat schizophrenic relations with each other. On the one hand, they are incompatible and at a paradigmatic collision course with each other. But on the other hand, they both coexist and constitute the conventional formal education with education for socialization clearly being in the role of hegemony. This schizophrenic relationship seems to be rooted in the fact that transcendence of the culturally given is to some degree a part of cultural reproduction of the society—it is an internal contradiction of the culture as pattern approach, where one of the patterns of any culture is to negate all patterns through their transcendence. Currently, there is evidence that with the increasing robotization and automatization of many modern practices, the need for creative authors in modern economy and institutions is growing (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011; Ford, 2015; Markoff, 2015). In spite of that, there is no much visible evidence of any pressure on the modern conventional education to accommodate this growing need (although, again, it may communicate via hidden mechanisms that we have not studied yet).

At the same time, with the world’s globalization, localization, and increasing migration of people within and among countries, the issues of societal cohesion and peace have become urgent. These demographic and political changes challenge the traditional notion of the ethnic nation state that is ideologically defined by one homogeneous dominant culture amalgamated by the culture as pattern approach. The expectation that all other cultures are deficient and/or inappropriate and have to be fixed or, at least, assimilated into the mainstream dominant culture defining the nation has become increasingly challenged. One powerful reply to these challenges has been ideological proliferation of the culture as boundary approach that goes under different names like multiculturalism, interculturalism, cultural tolerance, liberalism, cultural dialog, diversity, celebration of cultures, cultural equal rights, and so on. These ideologies penetrate both conventional and innovative formal education in many countries. The introduction of cultural relativism deeply embedded in education for tolerance is increasingly getting at odds with education for socialization that overall defines the modern conventional formal education driven by the culture as pattern approach—for example, the conventional formal education in the US recent push to implement educational standards in their educational reforms—No Child Left Behind (under President G.W. Bush) and Race To the Top (under President Obama). Educational standards are birthmarks of the education for socialization rooted in the culture as pattern approach. At the same, the focus on diversity and multiculturalism has also been embraced by the US conventional formal education. These two trends—educational standards and diversity—lead to the emergence of such an oxymoron ¹⁰ as “standards of diversity,”

Assessments [for Standard 4: Diversity] indicate that candidates can demonstrate and apply proficiencies related to diversity. Experiences provided for candidates include working with diverse populations, including higher education and P–12 school faculty, candidates, and students in P–12 schools. (The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, NCATE, http://www.ncate.org/Standards/UnitStandards/UnitStandardsinEffect2008/tabid/476/Default.aspx#stnd4)

When standardization of education for socialization wins over diversity of education for tolerance, instruction and discourse on diversity is often reduced to tokenism, political correctness, and new stereotypes, sucking all life from the culture as boundary approach. In our observations, the opposite situation of education for tolerance taking over education for socialization has not yet occurred in the modern conventional education but may happen in some marginal enclaves of innovative education (e.g. Freedom Writers & Gruwell, 1999). ¹¹ This paradigmatic incompatibility of the two approaches, resulting in tectonic clashes between the two, sometimes leads to abandoning conventional formal education commitment to diversity by eliminating classes or instruction, despite ontological and political pressures from the society. In contrast to education for authorship, education for tolerance is not an inherent part of education for socialization. That is why the education for socialization can live without the education for tolerance in principle.

The ontology of the culture as critical dialog is rooted in the human void and hunger for the final meaning, which is not yet present in the world but has to be born, despite all of the conditions and tragedies of chaos, necessity, survival, utility, cruelty, indifference, injustice, misery, and death. At the same time, the final meaning is never final and demands painful deconstructive examination of one’s dear ideas, worldviews, values, and desires for how much they really are meaningful and human. This deconstructive examination can only occur in the humanity as whole: the past, present, and future, in the Never-ending Critical Public Dialog. The search for final meaning in everything implies a certain way of life, free from necessities, survival, and utility (including vanity)—the life, which, up to recently, has been possible just for few (e.g. free citizens of slave-based Ancient Athens) or for small time (e.g. Jewish Sabbath) and for some limited domains (e.g. arts, sciences). It is not by chance that in the Ancient Greece—arguably the birthplace of the modern institutionalized education—the word “school” literally meant “leisure”—critical examination of the self, life, world, and society is not possible without leisure ¹² (Arendt, 1958). Education as critical dialog is a leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, world, and society. While being constant deep aspiration and constant actualization at micro levels, the ontology of the culture as critical dialog has never realized itself in its totality because of domination of the necessity, survival, and utility. Search for the final meaning in a critical dialog requires freedom from human attention to and engagement in necessities, survival, and utilities. It requires leisure as a recognized value, resource, and mode of living. Leisure, described here, is different from idleness, rest, vacation, recreation, unemployment, and hobby. Although, it may encompass all of them, they do not define leisure. Leisure is defined by unbounded freedom, unbounded creative authorship, and unbounded deconstruction, i.e. freedom, authorship, and deconstruction should not be tied to instrumentality, utilization, exploitation, and commodity. Leisure is about living well as a public and personal value.

It is not even clear that it is possible at all. However, with robotization and automatization, that for the first time may reach a critical point of dramatic decrease in a need for human labor (in a broad sense) on a large scale, such a possibility of a leisure-based society looms at the horizon (Arendt, 1958; Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Ford, 2015; Gorz, 1989; Keynes, 1963; Markoff, 2015; Marx, Engels, & Pascal, 1947; Rifkin, 2014). In our view, leisure-based society is possible as a hybrid of leisure and necessity utility, where a growing majority of people will be involved in leisure while a decreasing minority of people will be still involved in necessity utility (which will become increasingly authorship and agency based). The domain of the necessity utility will be shrinking as the need for human labor diminishes. Thus, we expect two major upcoming revolutions propelled (but not guaranteed) by robotization and automatization: (1) the shift of economy and societal practices from knowledge- and skill-based to agency-based society, and (2) the emergence of leisure-based society. The latter can become possible through “absolute technological unemployment” ¹³ and political will to create the “unconditional universal basic income” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income). As productivity of robotized and automatized economy increases, while the need for human labor decreases, the amount of the unconditional universal basic income will grow, while attractiveness to engagement in the necessity-utility-based economy, providing extra income, will drop, making the whole process self-correcting.

Ancient Greeks argued that the genuine goal of education is public critical examination of the life, self, society, and world through a leisure pursuit. As Socrates argued, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” They implied that the most noble and legitimate leisure involves this public critical examination. Of course, there is an interesting empirical question: whether people will involve in public critical examination of the life, self, society, and world, if they are given freedom, resources, and public value of this leisure. Recent 2013 experiments with providing “basic income” to poor peasants in India show that they did not become idle but instead engaged greatly into creative authorship of entrepreneurship, control of their lives, and public life (Standing, 2015). Of course, this experiment did not involve leisure or led to strong evidence of engagement in public critical dialog but it shows some promising evidence for the overall education as leisure hypothesis.

Currently, education as a leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the life, self, society, and world exists in the marginal enclaves in rather limited forms in democratic schools like Summerhill, Sudbury Valley School, The Circle School, and so on around the world. At the level of higher education, it exists in so-called Open and Opening Syllabus Education classes (Shor, 1996, also http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/OSER/). These efforts are often limited for the following reasons: (1) these pedagogical practices are embedded in overall necessity-utility-based society, institutions, and economy; (2) these pedagogical practices often involve age segregation; (3) education is excluded from the public domain of important decision making and action; (4) pedagogy of critical examination is often not valued (the latter is especially true for democratic schools because of their concerns about adult impositions on children). Democratic schools seem to be more committed to education for authorship (i.e. education for authorial agency) than to education for critical dialog. However, our observations of the students and alumni of democratic schools suggest a surprisingly high engagement of them in critical dialog—the phenomenon that should be studied (von Duyke, 2013). ¹⁴ Of course, education for authorship, critical examination, and search for final meaning is not compatible with the modern conventional formal education for socialization. It cannot accept societal imposition of education, its curriculum, its instruction, its assignments, and its assessments on the students, associated with the conventional education for socialization, robbing students from their authorial agency and critical meaning making.

We hope that our mapping of diverse approaches to culture with its implications for education and meaning-making process may provoke new dialogs, new problematics, and new empirical and conceptual studies in education, psychology, and other social studies.