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.

Keywords:

• Liminality
• communitas
• religious education
• ethnography
• COVID-19 pandemic
• practitioner research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In the 1970s, the popular salsa musicians Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz recorded Sonido bestial, one of the iconic songs of the salsa era that celebrated the band’s “beastly” sound featuring extended, high-energy percussion solos. Years later, after their conversion to Protestantism, they re-recorded the song with Christian lyrics and a new title, El sonido de la bestia (“The Sound of the Beast”) referring this time to the Beast of the Apocalypse.

2 The names of schools, towns, sponsoring churches and denominations, and all individuals in this article are pseudonyms, except for the school where I now teach. Authorization for the dissertation research at “Colegio Cristiano Getsemaní” was granted by the Harvard Committee on the Use of Human Subjects.

3 In another article (Seale-Collazo, 2013), I contrasted this curriculum of love with a parallel set of goals in CCG’s Christian Education curriculum, which I called its “curriculum of purity.” Both love and purity are “emic” terms, recognizable by students and staff as Christian values the school ought to teach or promote. They are not intended as analytic categories.

4 A Foucauldian framework focusing on power would seem natural for framing any analysis of school discipline and student resistance, and one could unquestionably be applied to the (auto)ethnographic data I present. My theoretical choice here stems from my interest in the ways schools can, in the interest of deeper educational goals, exercise restraint in the application of power over students, creating space for liminality and communitas. Such restraint in exercising power (or recognition of its limits) is inherently a political choice, though not always framed as such; it comes at a price, but the two institutions I describe seem to pay it willingly.

5 Puerto Rico, the easternmost of the Greater Antilles, one of Spain’s first and longest-held colonial possessions, has been a US colony since 1898. The US Supreme Court in the Insular Cases deemed it, along with Guam, the Philippines, and several smaller territories, an “unincorporated territory,” but Congress extended (against the wish of the Puerto Rican legislature) US citizenship to people born on the island. In the 1940s, an autonomist party led by Luis Muñoz Marín persuaded Congress to allow Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor and draft a constitution for a “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico” which Congress modified and approved. Muñoz Marín served as governor for 16 years (1949–1965) and, using New Deal-inspired economic policies, embarked upon a program of industrialization based on tax incentives for US companies that significantly improved the population’s standard of living. CCG was founded in the early years of that industrialization program, and its town of Coabey urbanized rapidly during that period. Muñoz’s party placed great emphasis on expanding education at all levels, and a sizeable middle class had formed by the 1970s. As the economic model ran out of steam by the late 20th century, however, the Puerto Rican government got itself ever deeper into debt and defaulted on its loans in 2015. Rather than extend to Puerto Rico the Title IX bankruptcy proceedings that cover other US jurisdictions, the Republican-dominated Congress imposed a Fiscal Oversight and Management Board which, since 2017, has forced the Puerto Rican government to close hundreds of public schools and slashed its support of the University of Puerto Rico. UHS and UPR have suffered severe budget cuts as a result.

6 I was one of the student council’s faculty advisors when this incident occurred, and remain in that capacity as of this writing. Another of the student council's faculty advisors who took on an administrative role in August 2022 has issued gentle reminders to students that the present dress code was arrived at with ample student input and therefore is worthy of being observed. If any sanctions have been applied, it has been done on an individual basis and with utmost discretion, as I am unaware of any cases as of December 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Seale-Collazo

James Seale-Collazo is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. He teaches 9th grade World History at the Escuela Secundaria UPR (UHS), and has written about religious education, technology in education, and emergency remote teaching.