RE: davydov/professional/personal

From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@udel.edu)
Date: Sat Aug 02 2003 - 15:57:20 PDT


Dear Peter and everybody-

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Moxhay [mailto:moxhap@portlandschools.org]
> Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2003 2:29 PM
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: davydov/professional/personal
>
> Eugene,
>
> You wrote:
>
> > In my view, Davydov's approach continues an intelligencia tradition to
> > downview people of power and common people on intellectual grounds of
> > manifesting poor thinking ("empirical thinking").
> >
>
> I think your discussion of this elitist tradition is very apt and
> something that Davydov
> was indeed drawing on.
>
> But shouldn't one mention, in the same breath, that the intention of
> Davydov's
> approach to instruction was to make theoretical thinking available to
> *all*
> children? This, for me, is anti-elitist to an extreme. Is there a
> contradiction here?

Absolutely. I think that Davydov believed that every child can become
"theoretically thinking intelligensia" with proper education. For that he
can be called an "elitist democrat". Yes, in my view, Davydov was an
anti-elitist and an elitist at the same time. Let me draw some (very)
limited analogy from US history. Educators who insisted on civilizing Indian
"savages" by taking their kids from communities and putting in board schools
in the first part of the 20th century were both anti-racist and racist at
the same time. They were anti-racist because they insisted that everyone is
potentially equal and has to be equal. They were racist in thinking that
their own white cultural was superior and other cultures had to be
eliminated.

Through the mandatory educational system, Davydov wanted to eliminate all
"empirically thinking" ethoses that he treated as intellectually backward
and morally evil.

What do you think?

Eugene
>
> Peter



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