Education in culture: an anthropological approach

Education is the process, either formal or informal of acquiring knowledge and skills leading to the development of understanding attitudes and values. Formal education is organized instruction of undertaken of society. The education system can be divided into two broad categories such as formal and informal education system., Educational Anthropology involves the use of anthropological theory, data, and methods to study educational practices, institutions, and problems in their proper cultural contexts. The range of educational institutions studied varies from highly formal school systems in industrialized societies to very informal systems in which important cultural knowledge is passed down from generation to generation by kin through such means as storytelling, experiential learning, and peer interaction. Now a day‘s some of the most interesting research is being done in ordinary classrooms, where ethnographic methods are used to observe interactions among students, teachers, administrators, staff, parents, and visitors. And many contemporary studies are not confined to the classroom, but rather follow students into their homes and neighborhoods, because learning must be viewed within the wider cultural context of family and peers. Educational Anthropology is a way of examining educational systems from a cultural anthropologist point of view and is a sub-field of anthropology and the main focus of educational anthropology is on education, although an anthropological approach to education tends to focus on the cultural aspects of education, including informal as well as formal education. Schooling as an institution and the issue of transmission of culture and symbolic communication has been explained taking various perspectives. The major as well as crucial theoretical concepts are Cultural Transmission, Enculturation, Socialization, Schooling and Inequality.