[Xmca-l] Re: Passions, (Projects?) and Interests

[JULIE WADDINGTON]

David,

I would imagine the reference to interest relates to the STUDENTS'
interest: meaning that whatever way it is approached it needs to be
introduced from and in relation to the students' current
knowledge/interest/developmental stage as opposed to being imposed in a
decontextualised way.

At least I think that's what's going on here...

Julie




> Sorry, Rob. I mean fifteen hours a year. The government has itinerant
> specialists who lecture from school to school. There is even a bus for
> visiting the provinces.
>
> In contrast, Vygotsky says:
>
> a) No class with ONLY sex education--since anatomical, sexual, and
> sociocultural maturation do not coincide in modern humans, sex education
> is
> not a science of a natural whole, where the object of study is given to
> us.
>
> b) No classes WITHOUT sex education--since sex education is simply
> learning
> how to be with people who may be of sexual interest, all classes must have
> some form of sexual "enlightenment".
>
> c) No sex education without INTEREST. But what, exactly, is interest?
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New in *Language and Literature*, co-authored with Fang Li:
> Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s
> alternatives
> Show all authors
>
> https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 5:40 PM robsub@ariadne.org.uk
> <robsub@ariadne.org.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Fifteen hours a week???
>>
>> I hope it's not all practicals - the teachers would be exhausted.
>>
>> In the UK nowadays the very inadequate thing we do in schools is called
>> Sex and Relationship Education. The "and Relationship" bit was tacked on
>> some time in the 90s or maybe early 2000s, if I recall rightly. They
>> missed
>> a trick there - they should have put it the other way round
>> "Relationship
>> and Sex Education". A very large lump of the population go into a
>> tabloid
>> induced panic as soon as they hear the word "sex", especially when
>> related
>> to children, and then fail to hear the "and relationship" it.
>>
>> Rob
>>
>> On 11/01/2019 07:14, David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>> Last July in Geneva, I got into a bit of a tiff with my hosts over
>> whether
>> or not Vygotsky had a theory of emotion. The commonplace position, taken
>> by
>> almost all high Vygotskyans including my francophone friends, is that
>> Vygotsky spent too much of his life developing a theory of thinking and
>> intellect, complexes and concept formation, and when he turned his
>> attention to the lower and higher emotions, that dark side of the moon,
>> it
>> was too late. He worked out a kind of prolegomena, in the form of
>> "Teaching
>> on the Emotions" (or "Study of the Emotions" or perhaps "The Doctrine of
>> the Emotions"--you can read what he did in Volume 6 of the Collected
>> Works). And the rest was silence.
>>
>> Here in Korea we are bringing out our tenth volume of Vygotsky's works
>> (see attached cover, with blurbs from Renee Van der Veer and Irina
>> Leopoldoff-Martin). It's all about sex education, which is a very
>> important
>> topic here in Korea, because we have fifteen hours of sex education a
>> week
>> mandated by the government, but the ministry of education has more or
>> less
>> withdrawn the downloadable materials for this, not for the usual reasons
>> but instead because of criticism from Human Rights Watch (it is terribly
>> sexist, homophobic, and just plain ignorant).
>>
>> Vygosky's view is that sex education (which he calls "sexual
>> enlightenment") has to be integrated into ALL subjects (so for example
>> the
>> test of a good sex enlightenment programme would be one that ensures
>> equal
>> participation of boys and girls in math and physics), it has to start as
>> soon as preschoolers enter primary school, and it has to be INTERESTING.
>> In
>> other words, instead of the "sex education without sex" programme we
>> have
>> here in South Korea, we need non-sex education...but with a good deal of
>> sex.
>>
>> All of which has got me thinking about the problem my Geneva friends set
>> before me. I think that Vygotsky really DOES have a theory that unites
>> passions and interests. It's like that book by Hirschmann on how the
>> unity
>> of passion and interest gave rise to capitalism, but instead it is all
>> about how passions, shared projects, and interests give rise to sexual
>> love, and it is more or less right before we would expect to find it: in
>> the Pedology of the Adolescent, right before the chapter on concept
>> formation, which shows how complexes (which are categories for others)
>> become concepts (categories for themselves). This is the chapter on
>> interests, which explains how passions (which are sensations in
>> themselves)
>> become interests: that is, emotions for themselves. (There is already a
>> passable translation of this in Volume Five of the CW). The only thing
>> is
>> there is a need for a transitional form--a feeling with others. Andy's
>> idea
>> of the Project?
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New in *Language and Literature*, co-authored with Fang Li:
>> Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s
>> alternatives
>> Show all authors
>>
>> https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660
>>
>>
>>
>>
>


Dra. Julie Waddington
Departament de Didàctiques Específiques
Facultat d'Educació i Psicologia
Universitat de Girona