This is the third in a series of essays looking at schools through different disciplinary lenses. Last week I argued that schools can be understood through the economics of scarcity and that organisational attention is the resource we should be most concerned about protecting.
Before that, I argued that schools can be better understood by applying the metaphor ofof ecosystems rather than that of machines.
This week I’m going to explore what schools might look like through the eyes of an anthropologist.
Making the familiar strange
If an anthropologist from a culture totally unfamiliar with the concept of school were to spend a year embedded in a range of different secondary schools, their field notes would describe a culture dominated by bells, timetables and ritual.
You can imagine them noting that at regular intervals an electronic signal triggers the coordinated movement of several hundred adolescents between specialised rooms. They’d observe adult members of the tribe standing at classroom thresholds, regulating entry according to conventions that vary subtly. Where some require silence before admission, others exchange informal greetings before allowing newcomers to cross the boundary. On the whole, they’d see that students tend to comply, apparently finding these rituals entirely unremarkable. To the outsider it might all appear completely arbitrary but to those within schools it’s just the way things are.
Our anthologist might note the production of sacred texts being produced during lessons and inscribed according to strict conventions. Dates must appear in prescribed locations with different coloured ink carrying distinct symbolic meaning — black or blue records original thought, red means error, green signifies redrafting, purple denotes reflection. Throughout the day they’d see other adults materialise in rooms without warning, observe proceedings in silence, make cryptic marks on portable tablets and disappear without explanation.
There are countless other examples of school-based ritual behaviour: the fact that students are all dressed in identical uniforms; the expectation that they move briskly in some places but are expressly forbidden to run in others; that conversation may be encouraged in one room but be unacceptable in the next. Students queue — with or without complaint — stand when instructed, and file into large halls where hundreds sit facing a single speaker.
None of this would strike a trained anthropologist as irrational. Human societies have always organised themselves through rituals whose purposes are very often inscrutable, even to those performing them. Ask anyone in a school why students line up, why assemblies matter, why books must be written in using particular colours for particular purposes or why senior leaders wander the corridors carrying clipboards and you’re likely to get an explanation rooted in “efficiency,” or “practicality.” Anthropology teaches us to be suspicious of such answers. Rituals don’t endure because they’re the most efficient way of doing something but because they address deeper social issues that, over time, become part of the background of everyday life.
Why we gather
We tend to assume schools are rational places because they’re so concerned with knowledge, evidence and examination results but from an anthropological perspective, schools are cultures, held together by shared beliefs, symbols, stories and ceremonies. The question that might most interest an anthropologist is, what social function do these familiar rituals perform?
Interpreting the culture you belong to is a bit like trying to explain your family dynamics to a new partner - everything that’s obvious to you doesn’t make any sense to them. Our own customs — what we do and how we think about it — are so familiar that they just feel like common sense. Students line up because doing so creates calm. Assemblies exist to communicate information. Using different coloured inks in exercise books makes it easier for an accountability audience to work out how students’ work has been produced. While these answers aren’t necessarily wrong, they only scratch the surface. Anthropology invites us lift the cultural rug, and peer behind the societal sofa to better understand what’s going on.
Educational debates are often framed in terms of effectiveness — do routines improve behaviour? Do policies raise attainment? — important as these questions are, they’re not the questions that most interest an anthropologist. TInstead the focus is on why customs evolved, what problems it originally solved, what social functions it performs. It takes careful detective work to establish whether a ritual has continued meaning or whether it’s become an empty habit whose original meaning has long since slipped from memory.
Writing about religion at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great Émile Durkheim argued that the significance of a ritual has little to do with the beliefs it appears to express. Although religious ceremonies may seem to concern the divine, their most enduring effect is profoundly human. Durkheim’s distinction between the sacred (rituals set aside and invested with collective significance) and the profane (the everyday routines of daily life) applies well to schools. If the school hall is used everyday as a canteen it’s profance, but when used for a school play or a prize giving ceremony it takes on a sacred quality. Through repeated acts of gathering, singing, speaking and remembering, societies continually renew what Durkheim called social solidarity: the shared sense that individuals belong to a moral community larger than themselves. As he put it, sacred practices “unite into one single moral community” those who participate in them1
If their only purpose is transmitting information, morning staff briefings could be replaced with an email. Whole school assemblies are possibly not the most efficient mechanism for making announcements. Prize giving ceremonies consume countless hours of rehearsal and organisation for handing out certificates that could easily be collected in tutor time. Judged solely by efficiency, these practices don’t make much sense. They persist because they are excuses for members of a community to gatther together. For a few moments, teachers cease to be individuals working in separate classroom and become a staff body. Students experience themselves as part of a single school. Schools repeatedly enact their identy through these shared rituals.
In Modes of Religiosity, Harvey Whitehouse extended Durkheim’s insight by distinguishing between two different modes of ritual: doctrinal and imagistic. Doctrinal rituals are frequent, familiar and emotionally unremarkable, providing the steady rhythm of everyday life. Imagistic rituals are rare, emotionally intense and disproportionately memorable. Schools depend on a mix of the two. Tutor time, corridor routines, assemblies and the countless small conventions governing movement, speech and attention become so habitual that they’re scarcely noticed. Prize giving evenings, school productions, and leavers’ assemblies are moments when ordinary routines give way to ceremony and ask participants to reflect, celebrate, or remember collectively.
It’s unlikely you can remember the details of any of the speeches your headteacher made, but you’ll almost certaintly recall details of some of the events at which such speeches were made. Those memories become part of a school’s collective story. Although the stated purpose of schools may be to teach knowledge, through shared ritual they also recreate the culture within which that knowledge is passed on.
The consolations of ritual
If rituals bind communities together, they also make them more predictable. Human beings have always used repeated, formalised actions to impose order on otherwise uncertain situations. Psychologists Michael Norton and Francesca Gino have shown that rituals reduce anxiety and increase our sense of control even when there’s no plausible way they could influence outcomes. Their power lies in changing our relationship to uncertainty. A familiar sequence of actions replaces hesitation with expectation, reducing the cognitive effort of deciding what we should do. By replacing uncertainty with familiarity, our attention can shift from navigating a situation to engaging with it.2
Schools operate under conditions of almost permanent uncertainty. Every lesson begins with thirty or so students arriving in a range of different emotional states, all with their own concerns and levels of readiness to learn. No reachers can predict precisely how an explanation will be understood, or how misconceptions might derail a lesson. Vavigating all this without familiar rituals would be impossible. Seating plans mean students don’t have to wonder where to sit. Entry routines mean they how to start lessons. Registration follows a universal script. These practices exist because they remove extranious choices from an environment saturated with complexity.
Wendy Wood has shown that much of our everyday behaviour unfolds in stable contexts with around 40 per cent of participants’ daily actions were performed in almost the same place each day.3 Rather than relying on repeated acts of conscious will, habits develop as behaviours are repeated in these stable environments. Students don’t consciously decide to sit down, open an exercise book or begin the starter activity. The bell rings and a chain of routines unfold almost automatically. What we think of as habits are, in fact, learned cue-response associations that reduce the need for conscious choice. By removing countless small decisions from our conscious awareness, routines preserve attentional resources for tasks that genuinely demand judgement, problem solving and reflection.
Unnecessary decision, ambiguous expectation and avoidable uncertainty all eat up a portion of our strictly finite capacity for attention. Well designed rituals are an attentional technology which conserves the scarce attentional capacity on which teaching, learning and organisational improvement depend.
Symbolic boundaries
Like any other culture, schools need to solve two problems: reducing uncertainty and deciding what’s acceptable. A blazer draped over the back of a chair feels fine but the same blazer lying crimpledon the floor doesn’t. Running is encouraged on the playing fields but unnaceptable in corridors. Context changes meaning. In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas describes dirt as “matter out of place”. Mud belongs outside but when smeared across a polished floor it becomes dirt. Although the matter might be identical, the system of classification through it’s interpreted very different. Because maintaining order requires shared systems of classification, cultures need to create symbolic boundaries which distinguish what’s appropriate from what is not.
Schools are engines of classification. Talking is required in a classroom discussion but strictly forbiddden in an exam. Paper on a desk suggests activity but on the floor smacks of disorder. School have developed intricate maps of where particular behaviours belong. Staff and students internalise these classifications to the point that hey come to see them as natural.
Ritualised behaviour communicates a school’s understanding of itself. School uniform does nothing to improve learning, yet schools in certain parts of the world invest considerable energy in maintaining these visible markers of cultural belonging. Expectations about equipment, exercise books, movement around the school site and the myriad of countless small routines that punctuate the school day might seem arbitrary but they’re all carriers of ritualised symbolic meaning. Schools which insist on silent corridors are making a ritualised statement about discipline, self control and respect. Schools that encourage conversation between lessons ritualise openness, warmth and relationships.
This helps explain why arguments about seemingly minor rules get so heated. Outsiders often ask why schools concern themselves with ties, trainers or tucked in shirts when there are more important educational issues to address. The question assumes these rules exist only for their immediate practical consequences. But systems of classification define belonging, distinguishing in-groups from out-groups.
When I first visited King Soloman Academy I was struck by how many ritualised behaviours felt alien. If a teacherwas impressed by something they’d instruct the class to give two claps — CLAP, CLAP — whereas to show spontaneous appreciation, students clicked their fingers instead of clapping. As an outsider, I was deliberately placed outside the school’s symbolic boundary and made to feel slightly uncomfortable whilst those within strengthened their cultural bond. Schools enforce ritualised behaviour to sustain the symbolic order on which their cultural identity depends. Shared classifications tell us not only what belongs where, but who belongs within the community.
Liminality
But cultures also provide recognised ways of crossing boundaries. Like any society, schools need to mark the moment when one identity ends and another begins. The first day of Year 7, the silence of the examination hall, the signing of school shirts and the final leavers’ assembly all announce that someone is becoming somebody else. Victor Turner described these moments as liminal: states of being “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”4
The move from primary to secondary school is one of the most obvious liminal moments. Induction days, welcome assemblies, tutor activities and carefully managed first weeks formally acknowledge that one identity is ending and another has begun. The rituals surrounding transition help new students cross the threshold to become fully fledged members of the secondary community.
GCSEs provide one of the clearest examples of liminality in school life. Year 11s are no long students — they become ‘candidates’ who are no longer ordinary members of the school community — but they haven’t yet become school leavers. The silence of the examination hall, the numbered desks, the invigilators’ scripted announcements and the opening of sealed papers all serve practical purposes, but also create a highly formalised ceremony. Years later, almost no one remembers the questions they answered but everyone can recall the febrile mixture of anxiety and anticipation in the hall, the muted rustle of exam papers, and the slow tock of clock on the wall.
At the end of Year 11, the ritual nature of school is made explicit. Proms, shirt signing and leavers’ assemblies contribute nothing to academic outcomes, yet we invest considerable resources in making them happen. The final days of school sees normal order inverted in a kind of educational Saturnalia. Previously, students would have been told off for writing on their uniforms but now they’re actively encouraged to cover their shirts with nonsense. Teachers who’ve spent years enforcing rules now pose for selfies and exchange hugs. For a brief period the hierarchy is relaxed while students navigate the liminal threshold between school and adulthood.
The evolution of ritual
Anthropologists have long observed that neighbouring societies borrow customs from one another until it becomes almost impossible to disentangle invention from imitation. Schools have existed in fairly familiar forms for thousands of years — ever since Sumerian eduba, or ‘scribe schools’ were established to teach the mysteries of cuneiform to budding scribes. We often bemoan the fact that schools have remained unchanged but they stay the way they are because, largely, they work. Classrooms, homework, detentions, kids complaining about school and teachers complaining about ‘kids these days’ are all centuries old traditions.
Despite the range of competing educational philosophies, lesson structures, behaviour routines, marking conventions and classroom layouts are strikingly similar across the modern school system. This reflects more than a gradual accumulation of evidence. Faced with uncertainty, school leaders imitate schools they perceive to be successful. DiMaggio and Powell called this mimetic isomorphism: the tendency of organisations operating under uncertainty to become increasingly alike by copying practices associated with legitimacy and success. Borrowing Max Weber’s image of the “iron cage”, they argued that organisations can become trapped by their own pursuit of legitimacy. As they say, “Organizational fields tend to become more homogeneous over time.” And, “The greater the extent to which an organizational field is structured, the greater the degree of isomorphism.”5
Faced with uncertainty, following the example of more successful schools seems like a reasonable bet, but this means school end up imprisoning themselves inside cages of their own unwitting construction. Imitation privileges what’s easily visible. It’s easy to observe another school’s lesson routines, behaviour systems or marking conventions, but much more difficult to see — and therefore harder to copy — the culture, professional expertise and years of refinement that make those practices effective.
In “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” Meyer and Rowan argue that organisations don’t operate solely on the basis of efficiency. Instead, “Organizations are driven to incorporate the practices and procedures defined by prevailing rationalized concepts of organizational work and institutionalized in society.” So, if a school wants to be seen as modern, rigorous and professionally managed, it’s likely to adopt practices that have come to symbolise those qualities regardless of whether there’s a direct causal connection with improved outcomes.
For instance, at some point in the last fifteen years, some school leader somewhere decided students should respond to feedback using purple pen. Whatever the rationalisation, the choice was almost certainly arbitrary. The most probable underlying reason is just that purple pen made students’ responses easier for inspectors to distinguish from teacher’s comments and students’ original work. Despite this, the plague of purple pen escaped its original context and proliferated across the system. And, once associated with successful inspection outcomes, it came to signal some notional concept of ‘best practice’. because it was easy to see, consultants started to recommended it and visitors from neighbouring schools enthusiastically copied it. Before long, thousands of students were writing in purple ink for on better reason than because school leaders hoped inspectors would like it.
The same story could be told about visualisers, retrieval practice, knowledge organisers, silent corridors or greeting students at the classroom door. Each of these began with a solution to a locally identified problem.6 But when these hihgly copiable practices become detached from their active ingredients, they have the tendency to become empty rituals or, in the worst cases, to lethally mutate. Meyer and Rowan described this process as decoupling. The ritual demonstrates conformity to accepted norms while everyday practice drifts towards local realities. Over time, the visible structure acquires a ceremonial significance of its own. In schools, rituals continue to be performed because they have become a recognised marker of ‘good’ schooling, even if no-one remembers what problem it was originally meant to solve.
As I’ve argued before, retrieval practice offers a salutory example. Used thoughtfully, it is one of the strongest evidence informed strategies available, strengthening long term retention through repeated retrieval. Yet in many schools it’s become ritualised into a mandatory starter activity regardless of whether retrieval was the most appropriate way to begin lessons.
Ideas are rarely copied in their entirety. We borrow what’s easy to imitate, jettisoning the deeper beliefs, assumptions and purposes that originally gave a ritual meaning. That is one reason why edu-fads spread so quickly to so little effect. Schools may think they’re adopting practices that will improve student outcomes but in most cases they’re just adopting the outward symbols of legitimacy, hoping that success will arrive through some mysterious form of osmosis. Sometimes — more by luck than design — it does, spreading the fad ever wider.
After the paywall
Why do sensible rituals become empty rituals?
Why do schools forget the problems their customs were created to solve?
And what would it mean to lead like an anthropologist rather than an inspector?
