ABSTRACT
From Basil Bernstein we take the notion of pedagogy as an anthropological means by which societies organize reproduction and change. Pedagogy involves the transmission, transformation and acquisition of knowledge and ways of knowing, doing and being (Bernstein 2000). From this perspective, pedagogy can be analysed in any social context where ‘learning’ is a means for constructing special kinds of persons, a definition that reaches far beyond formal educational institutions. However, as yet, studies in the sociology of education have mostly focused on schooling and universities or, put more generally, formal educational institutions. Few studies have engaged with contexts characterized by informal, tacit or implicit educational practices.1 To help address this gap, this chapter results from a sociological study of public speaking in Freemasonry as a practice of apprenticeship. Though beyond the traditional foci of sociology of education, this unusual topic mobilizes questions about apprenticeship, democratization and learning of particular skills and procedures. Freemasonry enacts a particular social form. As described by Bacot (2007), it emerged in eighteenth-century Great Britain as a fraternal society. It now constitutes an association in the French meaning of the term, that is to say it has a very specific legal status, legitimizing the union of people in order to ‘improve society’. With the aim of improving mankind by improving some specific initiated and elected members, Freemasonry has some common characteristics with other philanthropic associations. However, one of its distinguishing features is a very specific method employed in the process of transforming laypeople into masons. This masonic method requires members to ‘reveal’ something they were supposed already to have or to be but which remains until that point tacit (Poulet 2010). While there is a specific ritual to be practised, Poulet (2010) shows this ritual appears to be an ‘empty frame’ in terms of the knowledge to be demonstrated, one that is to be filled instead by characteristics of the knower. I will but briefly summarize this here (see Poulet 2010). What people do in Freemasonry is speak and write about abstract meanings, specifically about symbols. As
learners, Freemasons across all different grades of apprenticeship have to produce some kind of dissertation, referred to as a ‘plank’. This comprises a text of roughly 5-10 pages on subjects that engage with symbolic issues, ‘ritual and liturgy’, philosophical issues, and disciplinary academic borrowings. Such subjects might include, for example, ‘Symbolism in the grade of master’, ‘The set square’, ‘What does learning mean in Freemasonry?’, and ‘What is rationality?’. If the sociology of education, particularly that influenced by Basil Bernstein or Pierre Bourdieu, has shown that social background helps influence how people manipulate abstract meanings, Freemasonry is a paradoxical object of study. Although it has been strongly élitist during the bulk of its history, the current masonic population is characterized by social heterogeneity (Taguieff 2005). There are no official statistics on the masonic population and its social demographics. As declared in prefectures, the French lodges and obediences only give the number of members. However, available evidence on the masonic population indicates a certain social heterogeneity of membership, with a significant proportion from the middle classes (Galceran 2004). People in Masonry appear to come from different cultural and social backgrounds. While members do not all share the same levels of cultural, educational and symbolic capital, as Bourdieu would put it, they do share and enact together certain practices that one might have assumed to be the preserve of more privileged social classes. This is so, for example, in the practice of planks, that is, in the requirement to both write about abstract issues and to present these reflections in public. The planks and masonic works in general necessitate interpretative reasoning that draws on metaphors, symbols and analogies. As such the planks require the manipulation of linguistic resources for making decontextualized and uncommonsense meanings. It is this issue that I examine in this chapter. I discuss the characteristics of the masonic form of ‘pedagogic device’ (Bernstein 2000) and show how it can be considered a tacit form. I enact concepts from two dimensions of Legitimation Code Theory: semantic density and semantic gravity from Semantics; and specialization codes from Specialization (see Maton 2014b; Chapter 1, this volume) to explore the structure of relations in the masonic lodge, as realized in the body of knowledge in planks.
