Whither the symbolic animal?; Society, culture, and education at the millennium

Abstract

The question I pose here interrogates the evolution of humankind: How are we unfolding, and what form will our individual capacities and our global society eventually take? Education, of course, provides an important key to the answer, and the fields comprising the interpretive social sciences provide important intellectual resources for understanding and improving education. This reader presents some of the very best work produced by the interpretive social sciences on the social and cultural foundations of education. My aim is to provide teachers and students with the basic conceptual tools to understand a variety of sociocultural dynamics that shape the educational process in its many dimensions. Such sociocultural understanding is especially crucial for designing educational experiences -forging "tools for conviviality," in Ivan Illich's (1973) rich phrase- worthy of the multicultural societies of the present and future. Therefore, this book aims to compose one small part of the answer to the question: Whither the symbolic animal?