The School, a Ritualized Organization

Abstract

The present article is an effort to incorporate the history of the school into the cultural history of experience, thus showing how empirical culture is based – beyond the practices which students and teachers perform – in the ways in which actors of formal education socialize, through the rituals which institutionalize formal education. This paper analyses, essentially from a phenomenological and anthropological perspective, the ways in which school rituals of passage and interaction materialize, and how these contribute to sustain the governance of school life. This is complemented with the perspective of the history of emotions. This text shows some iconographies which show examples of the most frequent rites in the everyday life of school experience and their relation to myths, games and ceremonies. Finally, this article also puts forward the resistances which ritual practices offer toward the processes of change within formal education.