ABSTRACT

For a long time, scholarship in the anthropology of education has concentrated on the problem of the failure of minority students in various countries, especially the United States, to match the educational achievements of students from dominant majority peoples. 2 Quite early on, anthropologists evolved what Ogbu calls the “cultural discontinuity hypothesis,” the idea that linguistic and cultural barriers or differences between the home environment of a minority group and the school environment in which they were expected to learn the values of the dominant majority were the primary cause of poor performance by minorities. Minority children either spoke different languages or non-standard varieties, or they came from cultural backgrounds with different approaches to, and perhaps less emphasis on, educational attainments than were prevalent in the cultures of the majority. 3