John U. Ogbu

Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning

Core curriculum and multicultural education are two major approaches advocated in the current school reform movement. This article argues that neither of these approaches adequately addresses the problem of those minority groups who have not traditionally done well in the public school. Core curriculum advocates falsely assume that as a result of instituting a core curriculum, demanding higher standards, and patching up supposed individual deficiencies, all students will perform as expected. Multicultural education advocates inadequately design their program to focus on cultural differences in content and form. This article contends that the crucial issue in cultural diversity and learning is the relationship between the minority cultures and the American mainstream culture. Minorities whose cultural frames of reference are oppositional to the cultural frame of reference of American mainstream culture have greater difficulty crossing cultural boundaries at school to learn. Core curriculum and multicultural advocates have yet to understand and take this into account.

The next generation : an ethnography of education in an urban neighborhood

Ogbu has written two relevant, interesting, and informative books on minority education in the United States, both of which constitute seminal and pioneering work in anthropology, especially in the subdisciplines of urban anthropology and anthropology of education. Ogbu is a black African-born anthropologist from the Ibo tribe in Nigeria. He received his early education in Nigeria and his postsecondary education in the United States. This background, unusual in many ways, has given Ogbu the advantage to see minority education in the United States from both the perspective of an outsider and that of an insider. His premises, arguments, analyses, and conclusions reflect this and are indeed impressive. Both books were written with the urban environment as a major context. The reason for this is that it is within the context of the city that the different ethnic groups described by Ogbu came into contact with one another. The density of the urban population creates a level of intensity in personal interaction that is often not possible in sparsely populated human settlements. The politics and economics of the urban context also played a significant role in the various situations that Ogbu describes. Without the influence of these urban factors, these situations, in terms of both their dynamics and their outcome, would obviously be different. The structure of urban schools and the urban educational system constitute the core of his thesis. Ogbus first book, The Next Generation, is a study of the educational adjustment of children whose parents are primarily first-generation urban residents. Ogbu wanted to find out why minority children living in urban areas do badly in school. To answer this question, Ogbu went to Stockton, California, in 1968 to study Burgherside, a low-income urban neighborhood of Stockton that is within the Stockton Unified School District. Burghersiders are mostly blacks, Mexican-Americans, or Asian-Americans, many of whom immigrated to Stock-

Differences in Cultural Frame of Reference

There are at least two prerequisites for understanding the academic performance of minorities in contemporary urban industrial societies. The first is to distinguish among different types of minority status; the second is to distinguish different types of cultural difference. The distinctions between voluntary and involuntary minorities and between primary and secondary cultural differences are used as explanatory concepts. Voluntary minorities do not have persistent basic academic difficulties, no matter what their primary cultural differences from the dominant majority. The people who have the most difficulty with academic achievement are involuntary minorities. These difficulties stem from the responses that involuntary minorities have made to their forced incorporation and subsequent treatment, especially their formation of oppositional identity and oppositional cultural frame of reference. Such responses constitute secondary cultural differences. Unlike primary cultural differences, secondary cultural differences do not predate contact between the minority and the majority groups; rather, they are responses to the difficult nature of the contact.

Adaptation to minority status and impact on school success

The perspective of this article is that of a comparative researcher rather than a practitioner. However, what I have to say has implications for practice. Three factors have shaped my perspective since I began to study minority education more than 2 decades ago. One is my lack of background in the discipline of education; I have never taken an education course. Therefore I have generally approached my anthropological research on education as I do when I study economic transition, kinship, or religion. Second, my educational research began in a multi-ethnic community, Stockton, California, including African Americans, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and “White Americans.” The minorities lived together in some neighborhoods and attended the same schools. Using the ethnographic method, I studied their educational experiences and perspectives at school as well as in the community (Ogbu, 1974). My subsequent research was also comparative. One finding in the Stockton study was that in the same classrooms and in the same schools, some minorities did well while other minorities did not. In the second comparative study, I focused on the less successful minorities, both in the United States and elsewhere in Britain, India, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand (Ogbu, 1978). The third factor is the cross-cultural research of my colleagues and students.

Beyond Language: Ebonics, Proper English, and Identity in a Black-American Speech Community:

The discourse on the ebonics resolution passed in December 1996 by the Board of Education in Oakland, CA, has increased national awareness of the language problems faced by African-American children in the public school. The discourse focused almost exclusively on dialect differences per se between the standard English of the public school and the childrens home dialect or ebonics. This article has three objectives: (a) to contribute to sociolinguistic studies of speech communities; (b) to describe and explain sociolinguistic factors (beyond language/dialect) that affect Black childrens performance on standard English; and (c) to show a connection between the childrens dialect beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in school with those of their parents and community. This article is based on a 2-year ethnographic study of a Black speech community in Oakland, CA, characterized by bidialectalism and diglossia. However, the community and its children face a dilemma in learning and using proper English because of their incompatible beliefs about standard English.

Cultural Problems in Minority Education: Their Interpretations and Consequences--Part One: Theoretical Background.

Culture has featured prominently in minority educational research, policies, and intervention since the early 1960s. It is receiving even more attention today in minority education discourse due to the emergence of cultural diversity and multicultural education as popular national issues. A careful analysis of the new discourse suggests, however, that the issue has shifted from how cultural differences enhance or deter the school adjustment and academic performance of minority children to the problem of cultural hegemony and representation in school curriculum and other domains of education. But cultural diversity and multicultural education are only a partial solution to the problems of culture in minority education. This essay is in two parts. In part one I argue for a reconsideration of the earlier question about how culture affects minority school adjustment and academic performance. I also proposecultural frame of reference as a new level of analysis of the cultural problems that confront minority students at school. In part two I illustrate my points with two case studies from Minority Education Project in Oakland, California.

Seasonal Hunger in Tropical Africa as a Cultural Phenomenon

Miracle argues that if in fact hunger was expected people would work harder and so produce enough to prevent a shortage. Using evidence from two widely separated African communities (on in Eastern Nigeria and the other in Malawi) I propose to show why hunger has to be accepted as a fact of life by people who would avoid it if they could. The supportive data for my position are from the Chakaka Poka of Northern Malawi and the Onicha Ibo (Afikpo Division) of Eastern Nigeria. My field-work in the summer of 1966 among the Poka focused on ecology and economic organization. My data on the Ibo were collected between 1964 and 1971. In 1964 while studying folklore among Ibo students in the San Francisco Bay area I collected several references to seasonal hunger (unwu) and informants responses to direct questioning indicated that seasonal hunger was widespread in Iboland. In 1966 I visited Onicha (Afikpo Division) at the peak of their hunger season (June-July). Subsequently I collected written accounts of hunger periods in several villages from literate Onicha informants. Ethnographic works on the Ibo also refer to hunger periods (Green 1947; Uchendu 1965). My main source of data however is my own experience as a native of Onicha who also lived for several years in Abakaliki and Uzuakoli sections of Iboland where a hunger period (unwu) occurs annually. (excerpt)

Introduction: Understanding Cultural Diversity and Learning

Core curriculum and multicultural education are two major approaches advocated in the current school reform movement. This article argues that neither of these approaches adequately addresses the problem of those minority groups who have not traditionally done well in the public school. Core curriculum advocates falsely assume that as a result of instituting a core curriculum, demanding higher standards, and patching up supposed individual deficiencies, all students will perform as expected. Multicultural education advocates inadequately design their program to focus on cultural differences in content and form. This article contends that the crucial issue in cultural diversity and learning is the relationship between the minority cultures and the American mainstream culture. Minorities whose cultural frames of reference are oppositional to the cultural frame of reference of American mainstream culture have greater difficulty crossing cultural boundaries at school to learn. Core curriculum and multicultural advocates have yet to understand and take this into account.

Structural Constraints in School Desegregation

The main objective of this chapter is to explore the definition of the desegregation situation from the participants’ point of view and to explore the historical and structural forces that shape them.

Family, Fertility, and Economics [and Comments and Reply]

Family, fertility, and economics are inextricably intertwined. Yet despite intensive investigation, the interdependencies among these phenomena remain elusive. Expectations based on cross-cultural research and the theory of industrial society are contradicted by studies from throughout the industrial and industrializing world. Foundamental conceptual errors underlie these difficulties. This paper indicates how the interdependencies among family, fertility, and economics can be clarified by an alternative perspective. By positing that familial patterns (family structure and patterns of reproduction) emerge in adaptation to the economic constraints and options established by technology, it is possible parsimoniously to explain African urban familial patterns whose complexity has defied concise analysis for nearly half a century. The line of reasoning developed in this paper leads to conclusions about familial patterns and the interrelatedness of family, fertility, and economics that differ radically form the suppositions of conventional theory. Hypotheses developed from this framework point to differences in familial patterns in African urban and rural areas that have not been explored. For the Bassa of Monrovia, whose familial patterns appear to be equivalent to those reported for other urban populations in Africa, those hypotheses provide both a powerful and a parsimonious explanation for variations in family structure and fertility. Further work along lines outlined in this paper should prove most profitable.