Re: [xmca] Hedegaard article

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

We are ALL missing something here, Phillip. In principle, or, Deva might
say,
by design. Which may be why we keep coming back again to places like
xmca, trying to sort things out.

I am not sure Marianne is seeing all this. Please cc her on replies as in
reply all.
mike

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 3:43 PM, White, Phillip
<Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>wrote:

> Jay, you wrote:
>
> "... there are really both reciprocal influences and
> multiply mediated returning loops through these networks, not
> everything depends equally on everything else."
>
> though, even teasing out the reciprocal influences is extremely difficult -
> perhaps impossible.
> an example - i took my two grandchildren to the local contemporary arts
> museum, and moved from one room in which there was a great pile of heavily
> starched petticoats, to Damien Hirst's "Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain" - a
> ten foot by five foot by five foot glass vitrine filled with formaldehyde,
> in which is hung a young bullock, whose body is pierced with multiple
> arrows.  upon viewing the petticoats, granddaughter Deva, age three and one
> half years, said, "What a stack!"  the Hirst elicited a different final
> response.  Deva's brother, just a little over two, looked at the bullock and
> said, "bunny".  we all talked about what in fact the animal could be, and it
> was in time decided that it was a cow.  Deva then declared, "Good design."
>
> i don't for a minute believe that Deva knew what she was saying, the
> implications of such a statement.  however, somewhere she had learned that
> that statement was one used in regards to artistic endeavors.  how could one
> possibly sort out the reciprocal influences here?
>
> you also wrote:
>
> "It is simply not possible that educational institutions and adult
> norms of behavior with children, or cultural conceptions of what is
> best for them really are simply efforts to do good things for
> children. They must also, and probably primarily, be serving the
> interests of adults where those interests conflict with those of
> children, and very likely also working to minimize the rate of radical
> social and cultural change (or at least keep it well below any rate
> that would threaten the interests that have been built by history into
> these practices). I don't think we can honestly pursue the kind of
> "childhood holistic studies" approach to development without
> utlimately making a pretty radical critique of our own beliefs about
> children and their education and development."
>
> which reminded me of :
>
> "When, with Rousseau and Pestallozzi, the eighteenth century concerned
> itself with constituting for the child, with educational rules that followed
> his development, a world that would be adapted to him, it made it possible
> to form around children an unreal, abstract, archaic environment that had no
> relation to the adult world. The whole development of contemporary
> education, with its irreproachable aim of preserving the child from adult
> conflicts, accentuates the distance that separates, for a man, his life as a
> child and his life as an adult. That is to say, by sparing the child
> conflicts, it exposes him to a major conflict, to the contradiction between
> his childhood and his real life. If one adds that, in its educational
> institutions, a culture does not project its reality directly, with all its
> conflicts and contradictions, but that it reflects it indirectly through the
> myths that excuse it, justify it, and idealize it in a chimerical coherence;
> if one adds that in its education a society dreams of its golden age [...]
> one understands that fixations and pathological regressions are possible
> only in a given culture, that they multiply to the extent that social forms
> do not permit the assimilation of the past into the present content of
> experience."
> Michel Foucault. [1954] (1987). Mental Illness and Psycbology. Berkeley:
> University of California Press, p. 81.
>
> Mariane posits that there are six considerations when doing research with
> children.  (p. 80)  i can't imagine how all six can be sorted out.  i think
> that the description of Halime interactions in school and family fails to
> account for far more than what's suggested.  i don't know if we've actually
> got the research tools to tackle such an enormous undertaking. i admire her
> suggestions.  i just can't imagine how such an enterprise would be
> undertaken.  i can't even figure out Deva's comment.   am i missing
> something here?
>
> phillip_______________________________________________
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>
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