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144 Children bring the lessons they are learning at home into each new context they enter. The experiences that have in these new contexts—­ their interactions , the sense that they make of them, the strategies they undertake, the feelings that they have—­ add to the internal working models they are assembling . These new experiences may reinforce what they have learned at home, carving the models deeper. The new experiences may add specificity or new pieces to the models. These new experiences may also contradict, undermine, or provide alternatives to earlier models. In the previous chapter, I examined how young women in Viligama drew on the lessons about desire and hierarchy that they had learned earlier in their childhood as they worked through interpersonal conflicts involving feelings of envy, anger, desire, betrayal, and frustration. In this current chapter, I examine how these models of relationships emerge in actions in a wider social field, focusing especially on education. In doing this, I demonstrate how understanding the hierarchy model, in particular, helps make sense of actions, interpretations , and feelings in these new contexts. I am arguing that the cultural models and habits of feeling that are learned in childhood are activated and drawn on in similar situations encountered subsequently . However, I am not arguing that these childhood lessons lead smoothly and inevitably to produce uniform social participation. Rather, as I have discussed in the previous chapters, these models entail various strategies for action and response that people may take up, even as they use the models to interpret, act, and feel that there is a need for change. Further, these models that I have been describing are not the only ones available to people in Viligama. Alternative models and goals may suggest new plans for action. In implementing these new plans, however, the fundamental models learned early in life may pop up 6 Engaging with Hierarchy outside the Home Education and Efforts at Change Hierarchy outside the Home 145 in ways that complicate that new plan. As grown people take up these efforts at change, and especially as they shape social institutions that touch children’s lives, they may change the contexts in which the next round of young people are being socialized, thereby changing what those children are learning. In this chapter, I begin by describing some of the ways that the model of hierarchy emerges in relationships outside of the home, focusing on the domain of education as well as healing and employment. I then introduce ways that this model of hierarchy might be changed through individual efforts or at a policy level, focusing on Sri Lanka’s recent educational reform policies . These reforms challenge the older ways hierarchical relationships were enacted in schools. This has led teachers to alter their ways of relating to students in order to accommodate the new policy. At the same time, it has led them to alter their implementation of the policy in order to accommodate their own understandings of hierarchy. As teachers do this, they set up new ways for children to experience hierarchy and themselves. In all of these examples , I demonstrate how the cultural model of hierarchy emerges, arguing that understanding this model and how people actively engage with it is essential to understanding the ways relationships and efforts at change unfold. As in earlier chapters, I begin with one of the early field experiences that surprised me, making what I expected to be familiar strange and calling my attention to the importance of the particular shape of Sinhala hierarchy in contexts beyond the family. Students and Teachers When I first came to Sri Lanka, the school system did not seem to me remarkably different from what I was familiar with in the United States. Sure, the students wore uniforms—­ plain white in the village school, with special colors and ties in the private and national schools in town. The schedule was a little different from that in the United States, with the school year starting in January rather than September. And there were several big exams—­ a scholarship exam in the fifth grade, the Ordinary-­ level exam in the eleventh, and the Advance-­ level exam in the thirteenth—­ that determined what school a student could attend next. However, much of the rest of schooling looked the same. Children began formal education at five or six, progressing through one grade each year. They went each weekday morning and returned each afternoon, with days off for holidays and school breaks. Each school contained...

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