About Me

I am a rogue Anthropologist. Anthropology is made up of four sub-disciplines, Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology and Linguistics. It was founded by the American Ethnographic Society in New York in the early 19th century and was the first abolitionist organization. The defining theory and method of Anthropologists is called Cultural Relativity. Cultural Relativity states that, no matter how strange a foreign custom is, no matter how horrible it may seem, that custom in that culture is intrinsically tied to the people such that, the custom cannot easily be changed or removed without impacting the people in other unforeseen ways. A famous example often is a story from the Peace Corps. Peace Corps workers lived among a group of people with no latrines or bathrooms. The people would just go out into the fields to go. The peace corps thought to make their lives better by building latrines. The people in this culture were not accustomed to sitting on toilet seats and so would stand on the seats and squat. People began to injure themselves and soon, the latrines were just a smoking area and no one was using them and people went back to what they did before, go out into the fields. Psychologists do not like Anthropologists. Psychology was established by two German intellectuals, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Psychologists attempt to understand the mind irrespective of culture and language and disagree with Anthropologists that culture and language affects behavior at all. Where an anthropologist would argue that behavior can be affected by the culture around it, Psychologists see behavior in terms of wellness or sickness and has nothing to do with culture. In other words, as an Anthropologist, I think schools are failing because they are run by psychological theories of the mind. Psychologists have given us a minimalist theory of education, Cognitive psychology, that believes children only need to hear lessons to learn, they do not need to also interact or respond, or be made to respond. Hand on education is gone, penmanship, shop and home economics classes have been replaced. Sports and music are the only areas where children still get a full education, in that they train by repeating the lessons, music or movements over and over again until they are perfected. Education used to be like that, we used to require students to memorize lessons, the alphabet, multiplication tables, the preamble to the Constitution and etc. Psychologists, by prescribing medicines for ADHD instead of prescribing less TV time and more chores, contribute to and exacerbate the problem. Then again, Psychology was founded by Germans....