Fax + 41 61 306 12 34 E-Mail [email protected] www.karger.com Ó2005 S. Karger AG, Basel 0018–716X/05/0484–0223$21.00/0 Accessible online at: www.karger.com/hde James V. Wertsch, Department of Anthropology Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO 63130 (USA) Tel. +1 314 935 9015, Fax +1 314 935 4982 E-Mail [email protected] Commentary Human Development 2005;48:223–226 DOI: 10.1159/000086857 Cole’s ‘Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives on the Developmental Consequences of Education’ James V. Wertsch Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Mo., USA Key Words Embedded schooling ` Word meanings This article is the work of a master at the top of his game. For decades Michael Cole has been one of the world’s leading scholars on how literacy, education, and development are related, so it is perhaps to be expected that he can go through these issues with such insight. Evoking more wonder, however, is the enthusiasm he still manages to bring to the task after decades of work. For all the complaints we hear about ineffective schools, it is important to re-member that they have consistently been shown to have a powerful impact on hu-man mental and social life. This impact has been documented in numerous ways over the years; indeed it is one of the few examples we have in social science of a genuinely robust finding. Cole provides a big picture of these issues. He does so by bringing to the task a powerful interdisciplinary framework, and he wields this framework expertly on the way to imparting one insight after another. One of the talents he has displayed throughout his career is the ability to invoke a broad range of perspectives with facility in order to take on complex issues, all the while avoiding the temptations and pitfalls of oversimplification. My goal in what follows is not to comment on all the points Cole raises. In-deed, neither I nor anyone else but Cole has the ability to provide such a broad commentary. Instead, I wish to focus on a couple of issues in an attempt to elabo-rate them and raise further questions. I begin with Cole’s section on ‘The Consequences of Schooling in Post-Colonial Societies.’ It is perhaps easiest to see the consequences of schooling in societies as they undergo rapid change, but analysts such as Ernest Gellner [1983] have argued that understanding the consequences of schooling is the key to under-standing any modern society. In an analysis of the history of Western nation build-224 Human Development 2005;48:223–226 Wertsch ing, Gellner reformulated Max Weber’s classic definition of the state as the agency within society that possesses the monopoly of legitimate violence in light of how central education has become in the modern world. In Gellner’s account: ‘At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor. Not the guillotine, but the (aptly named) doctorate d’état is the main tool and symbol of state power. The monopoly of legitimate education is now more important, more central than the monopoly of legitimate violence’ [Gellner, 1983, p. 34]. So what are the consequences of schooling that are so important and how do they operate? Do they make us more intelligent? Or perhaps less so, at least in some senses? These are the sorts of questions that Cole struggles with in this and many other of his publications. I use the term ‘struggle’ here with something specific in mind because the lan-guage Cole employs to make his points does not always lend itself easily to his purposes. Although he clearly sets out with certain well-defined aims, I believe that the meaning and implications of his terminology sometimes seem to get in the way. For example, in the section on ‘The Consequences of Schooling in Post-Colonial Societies,’ Cole addresses issues of ‘Empirical Evidence.’ There he dips into his early work with Gay, Glick, and Sharp and revisits the finding that ‘schooling sensitizes children to the abstract, categorical meanings of words, in addition to building up their general knowledge.’ A bit further on in this same sec-tion he raises a seeming contradiction to what he has just argued. This contradiction emerges when he feels compelled to note that ‘it is not plausible to believe that word meaning fails to develop in children who have not attended school.’ Cole backs this up by noting: The nonliterate Mayan farmers studied by Sharp and his colleagues knew perfectly well that ducks are a kind of fowl. Although they did not refer to this fact in the artificial circumstances of the free-association task, they readily displayed awareness of it when they talked about the kinds of animals their families kept and the prices different categories brought at the market. Similarly, when the materials to be remembered were part of a locally meaningful setting, such as a folk story or when objects are placed in a diorama of the sub-jects’ town, the effects of schooling on memory performance disappear (p. 124). Why is it that Cole feels the need to say that schooling clearly has some im-pact on people’s understanding of word meaning while, at the same time, state that non-literate people understand the meanings of words perfectly well? Cole has tra-ditionally dealt with this seeming contradiction by examining how particular con-texts influence people’s performance on cognitive tasks – precisely the point of the last sentence in the preceding quote. Through ingenious, ethnographically grounded analyses, he has been able to document that people who do not demonstrate a par-ticular cognitive ability in one setting do show evidence of having it in another. This is certainly part of the story, and over the decades Cole has brilliantly and consistently demonstrated how misleading many of our assessments of cognitive abilities have been because they fail to appreciate the implications of his line of reasoning. Time and again, he has found that people who have been examined in one context and judged incapable of carrying out some cognitive task have demon-strated what appears to be that very ability when the context is changed – some-times in seemingly minor and irrelevant ways.Perspectives on the Developmental Consequences of Education 225 Human Development 2005;48:223–226 The beauty in all this is that it has added an important dimension to our notion of cognitive abilities. The danger in it, on the other hand, is that it can tempt us