The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in An Urban Neighborhood

Abstract

Ogbu has written two relevant, interesting, and informative books on minority education in the United States, both of which constitute seminal and pioneering work in anthropology, especially in the subdisciplines of urban anthropology and anthropology of education. Ogbu is a black African-born anthropologist from the Ibo tribe in Nigeria. He received his early education in Nigeria and his postsecondary education in the United States. This background, unusual in many ways, has given Ogbu the advantage to see minority education in the United States from both the perspective of an outsider and that of an insider. His premises, arguments, analyses, and conclusions reflect this and are indeed impressive. Both books were written with the urban environment as a major context. The reason for this is that it is within the context of the city that the different ethnic groups described by Ogbu came into contact with one another. The density of the urban population creates a level of intensity in personal interaction that is often not possible in sparsely populated human settlements. The politics and economics of the urban context also played a significant role in the various situations that Ogbu describes. Without the influence of these urban factors, these situations, in terms of both their dynamics and their outcome, would obviously be different. The structure of urban schools and the urban educational system constitute the core of his thesis. Ogbu's first book, The Next Generation, is a study of the educational adjustment of children whose parents are primarily first-generation urban residents. Ogbu wanted to find out why minority children living in urban areas do badly in school. To answer this question, Ogbu went to Stockton, California, in 1968 to study Burgherside, a low-income urban neighborhood of Stockton that is within the Stockton Unified School District. Burghersiders are mostly blacks, Mexican-Americans, or Asian-Americans, many of whom immigrated to Stock-