I have taken the opportunity of training to become a teacher to combine and hopefully integrate my previous anthropological experiences with current endeavors in the field of education. A natural and logical outcome of this has been the writing of the essays in this e-book which has taken a modified essay approach as I have developed this in relation to previous anthropological writings. It has been my hope and effort to apply it to hopefully interesting and critical issues in the professional field of education.

I have rediscovered and to some extent recovered the lost value of participant observation, an ethnographic and ethnological approach, of an ethnocultural and general anthropological perspective in the course of taking classes, designing lesson plans, taking notes, and observing and teaching in normal and special educational classes. I have even managed to extend theory and methods in symbolic framing in an integrative framework that an open approach to educational knowledge and training genuinely represents. This extension is represented within the writing and words of this manuscript.

I have indeed been surprised by the degree of overlap and transference from former Anthropological areas into educational problems. The language is different, and the paradigm shift is there. Problems are not considered to the same depth or degree in education as they are in fields like Anthropology, and yet there is a great eclecticism of the field, a willingness and need to borrow from many different areas of knowledge, that at times lends itself easily to intellectual dilettantism, to say the least.

My own relationship with the "educational system" has always been somewhat ambiguous. I've had more years of formal schooling under my belt than the vast majority of people on the earth, and yet I have yet to see it pay off in the manner of deferment of gratification that was the expectation and promise of a now by-gone era in which being an American counted for a little more than serving jury duty, being a taxpayer in support of questionable government spending habits and voting a poor choice of candidates and issues every election period. Americans turn around to see their opportunity structures sold out to foreign interests and governments, all in the name of a form of globalization that appears to consistently benefit the rich more than the many poorer people in the world.

I nevertheless retain an unshakeable and deep-seated faith in the importance and value of education for all people, not only as the foundation for democratic institutions in the world, but as the basis for human development and improvement of the human condition in the world. I see education as a life-long interest and investment and as providing the central set of solutions to the dilemmas that humankind confronts today, especially in terms of its own development. I therefore offer these essays in all humility and hope that they will be of some minimal value.