The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality

Delattre, Roland Andre

doi:10.1017/s0361233300003112

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The compulsion to exercise the right to education liberates man by making him become a member of civil society and, as such, a potential founder of a new natural society – a new family. All these rites both reflect and articulate the rational social structure contemporary society tends to generate and can be justified and explained by referring to rational thinking alone (Delattre, 1979). Schooling function is the socialization and as a rite it “transforms the style and values of everyday action, thereby becoming the new ground of action itself” (Grimes, 1982: 61).…”

Section: The Genealogy Of the Modern Schooling Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schooling as a rational rite of passage

Dimitrijević

2017

Policy Futures in Education

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Starting from Illich’s identification of the compulsory schooling process with the rational initiation rite to the modern, free-market, society, the paper aims to detach the philosophical premises this expensive and unequal ritual is grounded in. After having referred to Van Gennep’s conception of the rites of passage, we shall show that the schooling rite corresponds to basic myths of the modern age, that is, progress, tolerance, freedom, and equality. In the second part of the paper, the genealogy of the modern schooling system shall be traced back to the first fully modern political theory, the one Thomas Hobbes had elaborated. According to Hobbes there are two ways out of state of nature and imperfect socialization: the universal possession of the new science of nature and of human nature grounded in mechanism; and the simultaneous renunciation to natural freedom which gives birth to the irresistible power of the sovereign. Hobbes accorded preference to the first one. The constitution of the rational political body represents a shortcut towards the perfect socialization which derives from equal and universal possession of science. The schooling thus represents a way out of pre-modern forms of political dissociation marked by inequality, servitude, and unhappiness, that is, a rational rite of passage from feudal society to the modern one. From this perspective, the modern economic and political system makes a whole with universal and compulsory schooling.

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Section: The Genealogy Of the Modern Schooling Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Schooling as a rational rite of passage

Dimitrijević

2017

Policy Futures in Education

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Making Catholics: The Ritual Production of Conformity in a Catholic Junior High School

McLaren

1986

Journal of Education

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A great deal of conceptual confusion still surrounds the meaning of the word “ritual.” Consequently, ritual continues to have an ambiguous status in social science research. This is especially true of studies which attempt to analyze modern institutional life and contemporary cultural formations. This paper critically reconsiders the concept of ritual, particularly in the light of anthropologist Victor Turner's discussion of root paradigms. The author draws from recent work in ritual studies to analyze classroom instruction in a junior high school in downtown Toronto, Canada. Classroom instruction was discovered to be part of an intricate ritual system and was differentiated along religious and secular dimensions. Pervading all of classroom life, two root paradigms—which the author calls “becoming a Catholic” and “becoming a worker”—nested the values of the larger society. Corporate capitalist values associated with “becoming a worker” were discovered to complement closely those values associated with “becoming a Catholic.” Furthermore, the dialectical relationship between the root paradigms served to create the “ritual charter” of the school known as “becoming a citizen.”

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The Rituals of Humanity and the Rhythms of Reality

Abstract: Rhythm—the measured flow of motion—is an essential formative aspect of reality and of our experience, and ritual is among the principal cultural resources by which we grasp and participate in those rhythms and gain some purchase upon them and the energies they embody.

Cited by 2 publications

References 2 publications

Schooling as a rational rite of passage

Schooling as a rational rite of passage

Making Catholics: The Ritual Production of Conformity in a Catholic Junior High School

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