This paper is a commentary to a paper by Anne Solli, Frank Bach and Björn Åkerman on how students at a technical university learn to argue as biotechnologists. Solli and her colleagues report from an ethnographic study performed during the first semester of a 5-year program in biotechnology at a technical university in Sweden. Their study…

Describes individualized instructional systems as products of the same sociohistorical forces that have redefined work and individualism. Presents an analysis of individualization based on one year's ethnographic observation of an elementary school and points to the specific roles played by schooling in advanced capitalist structures. (Author/MLF)

Ways in which culture in general and cultural change in particular affect approaches to and attitudes toward learning are examined, drawing on both published evidence and personal experience to support the position that changes in underlying technological and economic conditions create differing cultural behaviors, customs, values, beliefs,…