Jung, Hyang Jin. (2007). Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School. Reviewed by Judith Preissle, University of Georgia

Jung, Hyang Jin. (2007). Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School. New York: Peter Lang. Pp. xvi + 185       ISBN 9780820486550 Reviewed by Judith Preissle University of Georgia September 9, 2007 As Korean anthropologist Hyang Jin Jung emphasizes, visitors to the U.S. as early as Alexis de Toqueville (1835/2006) have remarked on the preoccupation of Americans with individualism, with solitary pursuits, and with personal liberties. Anthropologists such as Spindler and Spindler (1990) caution that these are not the only values people have in the U.S. In any society such values represent positions along a continuum of discussion about what is important. In most nation states people discuss the balance of individualism to communalism, the mix of solitary pursuits with group activities, and the limits to personal liberty by whatever are considered the legitimate demands of society. The Spindlers say that a “cultural dialogue” about these choices especially characterizes the U.S. democracy. The balance among positions, of course, varies from one society to the next. The Spindlers emphasize that people disagree with each other and are even sometimes conflicted themselves about how to order these priorities. Other social scientists such as Bellah and his colleagues (1985) and Putnam (2000, 2007) have documented the decreasing emphasis in the U.S. on communalism in the form of civic engagement over the past decades. These and other commentators worry about an individualism, a solitariness, and a libertarianism run amuck in a society where people live, work, and play alone. In her new ethnography Jung addresses how this preoccupation with individualism and the self is encouraged in early adolescence by the adults who run middle school education. Her focus is “how individualism influences the socialization of personhood during early adolescence in a school setting” (p. 155). Developed from her doctoral dissertation, the ethnography is based on field work conducted from fall 1998 to spring 2000. Jung selected for study an urban public school in the midwestern U.S., the pseudonymous Lincoln Junior High School, with a reputation for strong academics and a diverse student body of European, African, and Asian Americans. She spent four months the first year and eight months the second year in the school observing classes and a variety of other school activities including field trips, disciplinary and counseling sessions, parent-teacher conferences, and after-school events. She interviewed nearly all the adult personnel as well as many students and some parents. She characterizes her researcher role as a kind of “adjunct staff” member, but she periodically took the student role in the classes she attended. The position she reports, however, is that of the educators—their belief systems and educational practices with adolescents. A former middle school teacher in her native land, Jung begins by briefly describing her own socialization in Korea. She relates the desire she had, growing up, for more emphasis from adults on independence, self-expression, and individuality. Then she comments on the pressure she experienced from fellow Korean middle school teachers to emphasize commonality and sociality in her work with students. She appears to have started her investigation with a positive view of individuality and its related qualities. What is compelling about this study is the critique she brings, not only to what she observed, but also to her own assumptions about the self and personhood. Jung organizes the underlying belief systems of the teachers she studied into their “folk model” or “ethnopsychology of adolescence,” their “folk model of emotions,” the “ethnopsychology of self in American individualism, the teachers’ “cultural curriculum of personhood,” and their “ethnopedagogy of creativity.” She describes these beliefs in chapters on self-discipline, emotion, and creativity. The folk model of adolescence Jung outlines is the familiar construct challenged by Mead (1928) in her study of Samoan teenage girls. Triggered by the biological development of adult hormonal patterns, teenagers experience a tumultuous period of volatile emotional fluctuations during which, as the teachers at Lincoln claimed, “the brain is on vacation.” Jung notes the persistence of such ideas about the teenage period despite research evidence to the contrary. She emphasizes that these beliefs about adolescence are framed by the Enlightenment view of human emotions as the opposite of human thought. Affect and cognition are considered competing forces that people must struggle to learn to control and direct. The folk model of emotions is this assumption that feelings are wild and primitive and must be controlled by thought and rationality. Consequently a major focus of teachers’ efforts was emphasizing to students the proper restraint of emotional expression. This meant limiting emotional intensity and communicating emotions verbally rather than physically. Good teachers as well as good students exhibited these forms of what were considered composure, self-control, and self-discipline. Jung contrasts this belief system about emotions with recent neurological studies demonstrating that affect and cognition are interrelated and interdependent phenomena and that both are crucial to appropriate social conduct. Nevertheless, the folk model of emotions contributes to the construct of self, personhood, and individualism shared in what Jung calls the ethnopsychology of U.S. self or personhood. Mature people are independent, autonomous beings composed of a unique sum of qualities, traits, and abilities. They make rationale choices based on well-considered value commitments. Mature people are inner directed and respond to intrinsic rather than extrinsic forces. This middle-class U.S. model of the self does not account for the positive influences of human relationships on people’s decision making and neglects the social context of most human activity. Jung documents a cultural curriculum of personhood based on these belief systems. She shows in elaborate detail how this curriculum was taught by how the junior high school was organized and how the teachers conveyed their expectations. The preferred relationship was the adult-child dyad, and teachers took seriously the responsibility they accepted for each individual student. Jung expresses shock at the absence in this school of recess or any other periods when youngsters were permitted unsupervised play and interaction. Peer groups, present but generally ignored by the school staff, were relegated to interstitial spaces of hallways, restrooms, and behind the teachers’ backs, and according to Jung they were otherwise dismissed by staff and parents as feared sources of conformity. Like many U.S. schools Lincoln Junior High School was organized into academic tracks, and Jung suggests that these tracks provided the most emotionally restrained and self-disciplined students the most enriched curriculum. Students, predominantly African Americans, who did not conform to staff expectations of proper deportment, were relegated to the lowest academic track. They were also least likely to benefit from the school’s “ethnopedagogy of creativity.” Jung believes that U.S. educators’ value for and support of student creativity and self-expression is the positive side to their emphasis on self and individuality. Unlike other displays of affect, the emotions that lead to creativity and aesthetic activity were welcomed and encouraged at Lincoln. However, even here teachers limited or structured creative choices, and they offered creative opportunities mostly to the high track students who had already demonstrated mastery of the fundamentals for which teachers considered themselves accountable. The study ends with what Jung calls a cultural critique. She summarizes into three areas what she observed at Lincoln Junior High School: first was adults’ assumptions that feelings interfere with thinking and thus are to be highly constrained; second was the privileging of students’ relationships with adults over support for and encouragement of productive peer relationships; third, and positively, was the encouragement of creativity that the emphasis on individuality fosters. The fieldwork evidence she presents for these patterns is compelling, in part because she indicates range, variation, and exception in how they occurred. The teachers did build some group work into the classes they taught, but students in low track classes were permitted to work only in pairs, and larger group activities were generally organized around creative development for higher track students. As a teacher educator and someone who long ago taught in a junior high school in the same region of the U.S., I find the patterns Jung reports to be familiar. I took into my classrooms the composure and emotional restraint that my middle-class upbringing had emphasized, and I too stressed verbal expression over other forms of emotional demonstration. My fellow teachers lamented that they wanted to assign group work, but that their students just did not know how to work together. Those of us who did assign group work had to figure out that teaching youngsters how to work productively in groups is part of what adults can teach the young. Finally, like the teachers at Lincoln, my junior high school colleagues and I struggled to balance creativity and fundamentals in our accountability for the well-being of our individual students. Other readers with experience in U.S. middle and junior high schools may find Jung’s patterns to be more or less familiar. Greater attention to other ethnographers’ depictions of middle and junior high schools in the U.S. (e.g., Eder, 1995; Hall, 2001) would have strengthened this study. The cultural assumptions Jung delineates, however, should be familiar to most U.S. educators, and I believe she raises concerns about the stress on individualism and emotional restraint that parents, teachers, and scholars ought to rethink. As Dewey (1916) cautioned decades ago, democracies depend on citizens who know how to work together and how to handle productively their differences in values, affect, and cognition. Next, as a long-time ethnographer of education, I would have had even more confidence in her report had Jung revealed more about her research methods and her theoretical frameworks. For example, she cites Sanjek (1990) on the necessity for acknowledging how subjective fieldwork is, and she conscientiously reports her personal responses to many situations and provides a careful consideration of her researcher role. But then she gives no indication of what traditions she followed in observing, interviewing, and collecting materials, in selecting sources for these activities, and in proceeding with her analysis. Likewise I find little explication of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks that guided her interpretation. My best guess is that Jung used an eclectic mix of her own cultural identity as a Korean national, her wide reading in the social sciences and anthropology, and her selective familiarity with the literature in anthropology and education to formulate a critique of individualism in U.S. schooling. This is organized around analysis of cultural belief systems, the purview of cognitive anthropologists, some of whom Jung cites, so I infer that this may be her preferred frame. Jung tells the story of “learning to be an individual” in a U.S. school well, but neglects to provide an adequate story of how she conducted her work and how she arrived at her analysis. Perhaps this awaits another publication, and I look forward to it. Nevertheless, I find this cultural analysis of U.S. education by a Korean anthropologist to be illuminating and insightful. Outsiders bring perspectives to routines and practices that often become invisible to insiders. Jung’s stress on educators’ folk beliefs reminds readers that alternative views exist of the adolescent experience, of the relationship between affect and cognition, and of the appropriate balance of individualism and communalism. Acting on such alternative views may provide youngsters better preparation for life and a better life for the U.S. democracy. References Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan. Eder, D. (1995). School talk: Gender and adolescent culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hall, J. (2001). Canal Town youth: Community organization and the development of adolescent identity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilization. New York: William Morrow. Putnam R.D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R.D. (2007). E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture. Scandanavian Political Studies, 30(2), 137-174. Sanjek, R. (1990). On ethnographic validity. In R. Sanjek, (Ed.), Fieldnotes: The makings of anthropology (pp. 385-418). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spindler, G.D., & Spindler, L. (1990). The American cultural dialogue and its transmission. London: Falmer Press. Tocqueville, A. de. (2006). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans.). New York: HarperCollins. (Original work published 1835) About the Reviewer Judith Preissle is the 2001 Distinguished Aderhold Professor in the qualitative research program at the College of Education, University of Georgia (UGA), and an affiliated faculty member of UGA’s Institute for Women’s Studies. Beginning a career teaching middle grades in 1965, she has worked at UGA since 1975 where she teaches, researches, and writes in educational anthropology, qualitative research, gender studies, and ethics.