Anthropologist and educator Susan D. Blum calls herself a schooling true believer who has lost her faith. Building on her two previous books, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) (2018) and I Love Learning, I Hate School: An Anthropology of College (2020) Blum shines an anthropological light on what she calls schoolishness, “the characteristic of being made for, by, and about school” (p. xi). Noting that humans constantly learn, mostly without the schoolish structures that have become ubiquitous across the world, Blum presents a detailed argument that calls these structures into question and offers the reader ideas for how to create a less schoolish approach to learning. Part vision, part autoethnography and part annotated bibliography, Blum draws on her experience as a college teacher as well as a wide range of sources in education, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and psychology to make her central argument: that schoolishness has undermined and supplanted human’s natural learning processes, much to humanity’s detriment.
Blum’s book is divided into three parts and 15 chapters. In Part I, she questions the educational gospel of schoolish assumptions, explaining why we need to look critically at schools. She points out that the human species excels at learning, but our schoolish ways do not tap into the capacity for deep learning innate in human beings and further, they cause harm, as evidenced by how many students in school fail to thrive. She elaborates on this notion by looking at some of the negative emotional and psychological side effects of schooling: fear, trauma, shame, perfectionism, anxiety and depression. Then, like many education theorists that have preceded her, she revisits the contradictory aims and ends attributed to schooling to differentiate between use value (What do people actually learn and use?) and exchange value (How does schooling serve as means to an end?). Taking up issues well known to scholars of education, such as the banking model of education, social and cultural capital and meritocracy, Blum asks how we might help learners become independent and confident without doing harm.
In the 10 chapters of Part II, Blum considers one by one the 10 aspects of schoolishness she has identified over the years through her work as a college instructor and anthropologist of education in East Asia and North America. In addition, she offers in each chapter strategies she recommends for making learning less schoolish. In Chapter 3, Blum points out the instructional fallacy that learning requires direct instruction, in contrast to learning by doing, observation, apprenticeship or responsibilities. Chapters 4–10 demonstrate how schoolish practices are characterized by teacher control, didactic questions, assumptions of uniformity, extrinsic motivation, individualism, separation and consumption and production. In each chapter, Blum contrasts these aspects with learner-centered approaches that spark curiosity, provide for playfulness, mindfulness and intrinsic motivation, are democratic, give ample time outdoors and support deep learning, connection and agency.
Part 3 presents a model for authentic learning illustrated by a local summer STEM college internship project that Blum studied ethnographically with her own student interns. She gives evidence for how the project exemplified authentic learning: real responsibility and value to the learners. She concludes the book by thinking through the messiness of change, both evolutionary and revolutionary, in the hope that we might make school less schoolish and create the kind of world we want to live in. Finally, Bllum includes in an appendix a schoolishness checklist to help readers consider how schoolish a particular setting may be.
Blum’s work is compelling: it is an intentionally and persuasively subjective account that is both accessible and well-sourced, speaking to a general audience while also providing scholarly evidence. Although each argument taken on its own is not exactly new, what is original is the way Blum pulls everything together under the overarching theme of schoolishness and substantiates her work with a wide variety of sources. This book makes a meaningful contribution to the body of work that questions schoolishness, such as evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray’s (2013) Free to Learn, educator Alfie Kohn’s (1999) Punished by Rewards and anthropologist David Lancy’s (2014) The Anthropology of Childhood.
For scholars and teachers of anthropology, Blum’s work demonstrates how scholars make the familiar unfamiliar as she exposes our taken-for-granted assumptions about schooling and questions each one in turn. Teachers of anthropology of childhood and anthropology of education may find this work particularly instructive as a classroom text. Teacher education scholars, instructors and students will find this book thought-provoking, critical and generative of classroom conversations about the purpose of education. Teachers who seek practical suggestions for making their classrooms less schoolish will find a useful starting point, while both teachers and parents can find ways of articulating the problematic assumptions of schooling. Child psychologists and pediatricians will also find this text useful, since they are the professionals who often end up dealing with the negative effects of schoolishness in their patients. Although this book contains few surprises for scholars of Self-Directed Education (SDE), they might find it to be a useful framing of the many schoolish assumptions that pervade our society. And while this text does not drill down deeply in SDE approaches and why they work, it pulls together a wide range of sources that can serve as a helpful reference book.
The 10 chapters of Part II left me wanting in a couple areas. First, among the 10 aspects of schoolishness Blum posits, one merited 25 pages while others were under 12, leaving me to wonder whether some of the characteristics she outlines are more central to alienated education than others. Second, the chapter titles and subtitles were sometimes challenging to decipher. For example, Chapter 5, “Questions: From Compliance, Control, and Evaluation (Authority) to Curiosity, Power, Wonder, and Effervescence (Democracy),” and Chapter 9, “Genres of Production: From Artificiality and Control to Authenticity and Freedom,” required repeated trips back and forth between pages to understand the connections being made between the large number of subtopics and the main thesis of a given chapter.
In light of this special issue on SDE, it’s important to note that while Blum favorably mentions SDE schools and unschooling several times, readers should not expect a detailed treatment. In particular, Blum’s book lacks attention to full choice and agency for K-12 students. Of course, Blum’s primary teaching experience is higher education and ostensibly, college students are there by choice, whereas K-12 education is compulsory and nonconsensual in most U.S. and East Asian contexts. Thus, making post-secondary education less schoolish requires less in terms of systemic change; better aligning a class to self-directed learning principles is more culturally acceptable and actionable for college teachers. And certainly, depending on the kind of support teachers find in their schools, similar strategies can be incorporated in a conventional K-12 classroom, as progressive educators advocate. In contrast, SDE approaches are consent-based and are unschoolish, not less schoolish. True autonomy and freedom to determine how to spend one’s time is not possible in K-12 settings without dismantling the hierarchical, coercive power structures endemic to conventional educational settings. Nevertheless, given that many progressive educators tend to distance themselves from SDE, it’s gratifying to see this acknowledgement of SDE as an example of authentic, joyful learning. Ultimately, Blum takes us on an enjoyable journey of her own transformation and we witness what is perhaps a renewal of faith in schooling – minus the schoolishness.
