Re: what begets schooling

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 20:06:31 PST


THANKS, Mike, for the pointer to the Oxford talk slides. I always like that
image of Sumerican classrooms looking both like our own and (in their
excavated state) like some mud-baked morgue or common grave .....

I think that we do have a modestly good idea about how schooling co-evolved
with the later periods of social organization, especially specialization
for clerical and management work. It's that still earlier, initial emergent
epoch that I'm trying to slim down to its essentials. At some point there
was an explosion in the need for more scribes, and that certainly seems to
have produced schools as we still, alas, know them. But what about just
before that ....

The earliest literacy we seem to know about was record-keeping. And maybe
orders-at-a-distance. With large-scale societies we had a centripetal flow
of reports, and a centrifugal flow of commands. But before that ...

I am trying to imagine some analogue, some precursor of schools before
literacy, or at least before bureaucratic literacy.

The ethnographic reports that you cite credibly indicate that
smaller-scale, less socially differentiated societies did not do explicit
teaching outside apprenticeship, or outside a kind of LPP. But that comes
from looking for our ideas of "schooling", not necessarily for their
possible analogues, same functions by different means, or corresponding
functions by different means. I am starting to wonder about storytellers
and elders as "living libraries", about meetings to discuss the hunt or the
next migration as places where there was also an information-sharing that
created a sort of "distributed knowledge-base" among overlapping groups and
smaller bands that came together at longish intervals for "ceremonial"
get-togethers.

Even small numbers in population can still be aggregating and depending on
information about a large territory that they have collective but not
direct individual knowledge of. There must have been "repositories" in some
sense for this accumulating knowledge, and there must have been ways to add
to it and access it, and there must have been something like "reading" and
"writing" practices --- the practices needed to participate usefully in the
knowledge store, interpretative practices/knowledge.

I can readily enough create a definition of literacy that depends on
generalizations of what we know as writing ... a kind of "literate" culture
before writing. And so I am trying to imagine what the analogue of "school"
might have been ... trying to get back to a mythical branching point, where
there were many proto-school institutions, only one of which evolved into
schooling as we know it once written literacy came to serve the tallying
and rallying needs of Sumer.

This is not just an historical mythologizing. Hopefully it is a way of
constituting the starting point for explorations of alternatives. Sumer
built big and baked hard, but it was probably not the only game in town ...
and I'll bet that none of the alternatives has been completely lost since
that time ... somewhere the recessive memes are still reproducing in our
culture today, waiting for the right environmental conditions to express
themselves more boldly.

Nobel geneticist George Beadle bred modern corn back to its
pre-domesticated maize ancestors ... from which one could then recover much
of the genetic potential of the species that had been lost to our selective
self-interest.

JAY.

At 11:29 AM 12/16/2002 -0800, you wrote:

>Social aggregration and modes of life that require coordination that cannot
>be handled by other means begAT schooling, by my interpretation, Jay. How
>humanity can save itself from its own cleverness is a question I have not
>figured out!
>mike
>PS-- See paper on lchc.ucsd.edu/people/mike cole from oxford re these
>issues

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
610 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
---------------------------



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