[Xmca-l] The Ideal

[Andy Blunden]

Although I am sure that 99.9% (or thereabouts) of people who read what 
Vygotsky said about the presence of the ideal in the child's 
environment, interpreted this to mean simply that adult speech provided 
a model on which children could model their own language-use, 
nonetheless, this is not ultimately what the presence of the ideal means 
in the Marxist/Hegelian tradition of which Vygotsky and many of his 
colleagues were a part.
It would be true to say for example that the ideal of democracy exists 
with US political life, even though I doubt there is a single electoral 
process which is not corrupted by money and degraded by ignorance, 
prejudice and narrow self-interest. Nonetheless, in all the rhetoric and 
legislation around the broader political life, and what peoplpe tell 
their kids and what young people cry out for in their political 
interventions, that ideal exists, it exists as an immanent tendency 
present in the very foundation of the Republic. Cynicism aside this is 
not a fiction.
So while something like a model is the most obvious and powerful 
manifestation of the Ideal, it is not the beginning and end of the 
Ideal. In the absence of such a model, the Ideal is still present in any 
living community.
The NSL case is a case where we can learn more deeply what an Ideal can be.

Andy
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*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/