About

A series of memories juxtaposing family traditions of Chinese (Wong) and Southern (Fowler) roots. The purpose is to stimulate conversations about family memories and how they are constructed, modified, and passed on from one generation to another.

Inspired by Lawrence Cremin’s definition of education and his concept of configurations of educational institutions in the examination of families and educators.

Given these structures, it would seem that what is needed for an adequate historiography of the family as educator is an investigation of the new literature as well as the sources themselves, based on an explicitly stated and critically analyzed theory of education. I have attempted to formulate such a theory, though I am fully aware that it is only one among many possibilities. It defines education as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities (and the results of that effort)—thereby assuming a certain overlap with concepts such as socialization, enculturation, and development but insisting at the same time that the several concepts are not synonymous. It acknowledges that education generally proceeds via many individuals and institutions—parents, peers, siblings, and friends as well as families, churches, libraries, museums, summer camps, schools, and colleges. It assumes, too, that the various educators in a community often relate to one another in configurations, though it cautions that such relationships may be dissonant as well as consonant, contradictory as well as complementary. And it assumes finally that individuals come to educational situations with their own temperaments, histories, and purposes, that different individuals will interact with any given educational institution or configuration in different ways and with different outcomes, and that in considering the interactions and the outcomes it is as necessary to examine the lives of those undergoing education as it is to examine the efforts of the educators.

Lawrence A. Cremin, “The Family as Educator: Some Comments on the Recent Historiography,” in Hope Jensen Leichter, Ed., The Family as Educator, New York: Teachers College Press, 1974, p.86.