[Xmca-l] Re: The Wreck of the Sewol
Andy Blunden
ablunden@mira.net
Sun Apr 20 19:27:33 PDT 2014
Paul, making an adjective our of your name, using it to name a
foundation and then calling yourself president of the foundation goes so
far beyond anything in contemporary Anglo-American culture, beyond even
what Jesus Christ did, that I could only take it as satirical.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Dr. Paul C. Mocombe wrote:
> I question that myself Francine...should I use negative dialectic to convict bourgeois society for nonidentification... (Adorno)...or offer an alternative discourse as offered by the vodou ethic and the spirit of communism of my ancestors? It is as though I am caught in a bhabhaian liminal space, which for me represents a bourgeois activity of a discriminated against other...similar to Du Bois' s notion of double consciousness. I have reverted to questioning all of my education precisely bcuz I have an alternative consciousness which rejects the majority of the foolishness, subject/object distinction, idealism/materialism, etc., of bourgeois society.
>
>
> Dr. Paul C. Mocombe
> President
> The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc.
> www.mocombeian.com
> www.readingroomcurriculum.com
> www.paulcmocombe.info
>
> <div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com> </div><div>Date:04/20/2014 1:56 PM (GMT-05:00) </div><div>To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu> </div><div>Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The Wreck of the Sewol </div><div>
> </div>Message from Francine:
>
>
> Paul,
>
>
> If education and getting ‘enframed’ by bourgeois logic “threatens all life on earth”,
>
> why do you never-the-less use bourgeois titles like Dr., President, and Foundation, Inc. ?
>
>
>
> Just asking.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Sent from Windows Mail
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Dr. Paul C. Mocombe
> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2014 7:17 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>
>
>
>
>
> Thank you david...well said. Many people should read althusser more...especially minorities, embourgeoised blacks and women, who have adopted this viewpoint that education and getting one "enframed" by bourgeois logic is the key to equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution....it is an ideological apparatus, intended to recursively reorganize and reproduce a perverse ethos that threatens all life on earth!
>
>
> Dr. Paul C. Mocombe
> President
> The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc.
> www.mocombeian.com
> www.readingroomcurriculum.com
> www.paulcmocombe.info
>
> Race and Class Distinctions within Black Communities
> www.routledge.com/9780415714372
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> Date:04/19/2014 6:00 PM (GMT-05:00)
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] The Wreck of the Sewol
>
> For three days, every newscaster in South Korea has worn black. The
> nightly news consists of two hours of stories about the capsizing of
> the ferry Sewol, with hundreds of high school students on their last
> high school field trip, off of Jindo Island near Jeju.
>
> It's not like watching CNN when there is some heart-breaking story but
> no news, and you get these callous talking heads hemming and hawing
> for hours on end. No; here, when hearts break, you see see and hear it
> on the evening news: teachers howling with grief, mothers prostrate
> with emotion, and furious fathers attacking government officials,
> reporters, and even surviving teachers.
>
> Yesterday the assistant principal, who had survived the wreck and done
> his best to save his students, tried to apologize to parents for
> permitting the trip. They did not accept his apology, and he left the
> building, walked into the woods, and hanged himself.
>
> The captain is in custody. Nobody is sure what caused the wreck, but
> he was one of the first to leave, and there is a lot of talk about
> prosecuting him under a quaint maritime law, probably inspired by a
> poor reading of Conrad's Lord Jim, that does not allow the captain to
> leave the ship while there are still people who need assistance.
>
> There is a much more severe crime to consider though. Shortly after
> impact, when the ship was already listing nearly 45 degrees and
> talking in water over the side, the captain told the children to
> remain where they were below decks and await instructions. Then the
> intercom died and the lights went out. And we have cell phone
> recordings of the children waiting patiently in the dark as the ship
> sank.
>
> Why did they wait? Why didn't more of these high school students,
> eleventh graders who were sixteen and seventeen years old, of school
> leaving age, declare the broadcast null and void and begin to lead
> their classes to the high side of the capsized ship, where they could
> slide down the inclined plane of the boat into the water and be
> rescued by the arriving fishing boats?
>
> I don't know the answer to that. But yesterday we were discussing this
> in our weekly seminar on Vygotsky--we're translating Vygotsky's last
> lectures to the Herzen Pedogogical Institute, only three months before
> he died. Pedology has already been declared a bourgeois creed, and
> Vygotsky knows that his students are learning a subject which will
> soon cease to exist from a professor who is likewise about to join the
> faculty invisible.
>
> Vygotsky deftly presents the prevailing view of education, one that
> will be immediately familiar to every progressive teacher today.
> Children are born equal, but they are everywhere made radically
> unequal by social conditions. By providing children equal
> opportunities and equal access to mediating artifacts, we can ensure
> not only egalitarian development but a more equitable society.
>
> Vygotsky remarks mischievously that this view is bourgeois (pedology
> is under attack as a bourgeois doctrine), and of course he is quite
> right: it is the empiricist view of John Locke, of Thorndike, and of
> Watson. He notes that it can't account for the profoundly internal
> nature of development, that it deprives children of their initiative
> and their active role in development, and that it doesn't explain how
> completely new things, things the child has never heard before, arise
> in speech.
>
> I think there is something even more immediate and pressing that the
> bourgeois view can't account for either: the child's ability to throw
> off the social environment when that social environment has become
> murderous and only the child's own judgment can lead to safety. And
> the problem is that it accounts for the child's inability to do this
> rather too well.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
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