Jay,
In the part of the world other than the U.S. that I am most familiar
with, the earliest known "schools," or at least training
organizations as distinct from family and community were the
monasteries and ashrams, which served, beginning in B.C. times (and
still serve) the purpose of apprenticing folks into "professional"
religious roles. Many of these had the explicit agenda of removing
children from existing family and community structures to serve what
was seen as the good of the larger society. Being involved in family
and community life was considered to interfere with religious
training. Kind of makes me wonder how influential this sort of
agenda has been in creating our conception of schooling...
At any rate, I would be very interested to see what you come up with
in your historical search. I absolutely agree that this sort of
historical analysis is need to understand how schools have evolved in
relation to other institutions, and as a step to envisioning
alternatives. I am generally skeptical of efforts to try to make
schools more like other social organizations, or other social
organizations more like schools precisely because it ignores all of
the historical developments that have lead to the current
institutional relations.
The trick in doing a back-read on the origins of school, of course,
is figuring out what a school precursor is when it doesn't conform to
our conception of school (same problem that Fleck took on in his
Genesis of a Scientific Fact). You might want to take a look at
Patricia Cohen's book, "A Calculating People." Sorry I don't have
the full ref. handy right now. While Cohen's book does not go back
to the Sumerians, it does a nice job of showing how schooling and
arithmetic calculation as social practice coevolved in the early
U.S., which may give your some clues to apply elsewhere.
Cheers,
King
>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
>---------------------------
-- ______________________________ King Beach Learning, Technology and Culture Michigan State University phone: 517-381-8884 fax: 517-381-8885 email: kdbeach@msu.edu
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