developmentalism

Phil Agre (pagre who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Sun, 28 Apr 1996 17:02:14 -0700 (PDT)

I read J. E. Stone's article on "developmentalism", forwarded to the list
by Ilda Carreiro King, with intense fascination. On the surface it sounds
so similar to my personal concerns about certain kinds of constructivist
teaching, yet it is so profoundly distorted underneath. It reads as if
written by someone who is trying to simulate an academic register without
really wanting to reason in academic terms. As so often with arguments for
extreme views, it is structured around a network of dichotomies and constructs
itself as reasonable by identifying its opponents with the opposite extreme.
The dichotomy on the surface is developmentalist versus experimentalist.
The immediate problem is that this opposition is ill-formed, opposing a
substantive position to a methodological position. The author's own substantive
position is not squarely presented, but can be grasped in fragments through
its opposition to developmentalism; doing so is hard work, though, because
attention is continually being drawn to notions of science and experiment.
The dichotomy that really structures the argument, I believe, is original
goodness versus original sin, with developmentalism being identified with
original goodness and the author's nameless alternative being identified
with original sin. The connection between behaviorism and theology took me
a while to get used to, but it makes sense: fundamentalist versions of both
require an absolute disregard for individual agency, opinion, and desire,
and the forcible ("assertive") imposition of an extrinsic order. But the
analogy is also limited; behaviorism does not imagine the untaught child to
be bad, just empty, whereas the author clearly imagines that only bad things
can result from the failure to impose order.

The author's mangled account of Vygotsky, it seems to me, is a clear symptom
of the fallacy of the developmentalism-versus-behaviorism-and-original-sin
dichotomy. Each half of the dichotomy is clearly unreasonable, but Vygotsky
is clearly associated with neither half. Vygotsky's theory of the appropriation
of cultural forms of activity is "developmentalist" in asserting that learning
only takes place through active appropriation, and it is not-developmentalist
in assuming that learning only takes place through the appropriation of
historically specific cultural forms. Vygotsky's theory is thus, in this one
sense anyway, the synthesis of the thesis-and-antithesis of Stone's article.

I'll leave it to the Vico, Dewey, and the other alleged developmentalists to
determine whether Stone has treated them accurately. At the same time, I can
very well understand how an argument like Stone's could have political efficacy
in reactionary organizing against the American public school system. To the
extent that developmentalism really is taught in teacher education programs,
or to the extent that student teachers could misunderstand what they are being
taught in that way, the public schools are, in my opinion, doomed.

Phil Agre