ABSTRACT
It does not take particularly extensive travel, anthropological expertise, or keen ethnographic skills to notice that truths considered incontestable in one community are matters of contention in another. One need merely open a newspaper, switch on a television, or boot up a networked computer. Yet we know remarkably little about how such differences come about or how they are sustained. In this chapter, I examine how schools foster and preserve culturally distinctive epistemologies. I begin by presenting some findings from a comparative study of argumentation and epistemology I conducted among Israeli children and adolescents. In light of these findings, I then examine how argumentative discourse-both inside and outside of classrooms-functions as a key venue for cultural education. I then discuss research frameworks currently being developed to investigate such discourse and identify both promise and risk in these approaches. Finally, I discuss the implications for cultural education of both the empirical findings of my own study and of the theoretical perspectives discussed in the latter sections of the chapter.
