Schools as Cultural Reproduction Devices

Abstract

Abstract A prevailing view of education is that schools are designed to teach academic content knowledge. Schools are thus predominantly studied in the context of content mastery and rarely from a cultural evolutionary perspective. The authors propose that schools should be studied as devices of cultural reproduction that foster cultural contact, transmission, and change, where children acquire specific cultural adaptations (e.g., learning a lingua franca) to be reproduced to fulfil particular cultural and ecological demands. They use historical examples to illustrate how schools support cultural stability and how they serve as the point of contact to deliver content. They discuss how schools contribute to cultural reproductions of knowledge and skills as well as values and identities. Finally, the authors raise important questions about the suitability of most traditional schools in satisfying current global changes and cultural demands.