The sound of the beast: Structure and anti-structure in religious and secular schooling

Abstract Tensions between spiritual development and school discipline academic goals at one Puerto Rican Protestant high school mirror tensions between leadership development and discipline at my own school. At the Protestant school where I conducted ethnographic research, faculty-student hierarchies were downplayed and students were given ample freedom of expression in worship, in the interest of encouraging them to have individual encounters with God. At the second site, I recount “auto-ethnographically” how the school’s leadership-development mission is associated with rituals and relationships paralleling those in the first site. As part of this auto-ethnography, I also describe how students, through the student government which serves as a counterpart to worship activities at the Protestant school, successfully contested the administration’s authority in a controversy over the dress code. I employ both cases to illustrate how liminality and communitas, concepts developed by the anthropologists Victor Turner and Edith Turner, explain the tensions described and serve to draw attention to similar moments and spaces in religious and secular schooling. The writings of John Taylor Gatto as well as Eileen de los Reyes and Patricia Gozemba’s concept of “pockets of hope” further highlight this tension. Liminality and communitas also help identify much of what was lost in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research with these concepts could produce important insights into the possibilities and pitfalls of such educational endeavours, as well as into the interplay between structure and agency in schooling.