[Xmca-l] Re: Ethics as Once and Future Discipline

[Peter Smagorinsky]

In case anyone’s interested, I studied federally funding character ed programs awhile back; this is the article version, and a book version came out a couple of years later.
Smagorinsky, P., & Taxel, J. (2004). The discourse of character education: Ideology and politics in the proposal and award of federal grants. Journal of Research in Character Education, 2(2), 113-140. Available at http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/JRCE/JRCE2004.pdf

Abstract: This study analyzes the ways in which character education has been articulated in the current character education movement. The study consists of a discourse analysis of proposals funded by the United States Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement. This analysis identifies the discourses employed to outline states’ conceptions of character and character education as revealed through the proposals. The presentation consists of two profiles from sets of states that exhibit distinct conceptions of character and character education. One profile is created from two adjacent states in the American Deep South. We argue that this conception represents the dominant perspective promoted in the United States, one based on an authoritarian conception of character in which young people are indoctrinated into the value system of presumably virtuous adults through didactic instruction. The other profile comes from two adjacent states in the American Upper Midwest. This approach springs from a well-established yet currently marginal discourse about character, one that emphasizes attention to the whole environment in which character is developed and enacted and in which reflection on morality, rather than didactic instruction in a particular notion of character, is the primary instructional approach. The analysis of the discourse of character education is concerned with identifying the ideologies behind different beliefs about character and character education.

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2018 5:35 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Ethics as Once and Future Discipline

In HDHMF, Vygotsky makes the point that a good deal of our "character education" proceeds outside-in. That is, we focus on the behavior (especially the sexual behavior) of children (especially adolescents) and then we speculate about the effect this might have on their thinking, and this putative effect, more of a hope or a pious wish than a scientific fact, is called "ethics" (or "morals"). But Vygotsky says that unless the child is genuinely in control of his or her own behavior, so-called "ethical" acts are not ethical at all. There are many reasons for not bullying or beating or betraying fellow humans that have very little to do with ethics; there is nothing moral about living in fear of punishment.

Treated historically, ethics is, as Mike referred to cultural psychology, a once and future discipline. In the early eighteenth century, it actually DID form part of political economy--Adam Smith taught both subjects, and he saw the latter as an offshoot of the former ("we trust our livelihood not to the generosity of the baker but to his self-interest"). As we've discussed on this list, Marx was also anxious to establish political economy as a separate science (as Durkheim was to do with sociology), and so he didn't often invoke "ethics" as such. It's important to remember, though, that Marx doesn't evoke "historical materialism" or "dialectical materialism" as such either, and that Vygotsky's own name for his cultural-historical psychology was "the historical theory of the higher psychic functions", at least according to the recently published notebooks. Names are often late-emerging in the development of any science.

Yet it seems to me that there is another good reason for not invoking "ethics" as such. Having "turned the tables" on nature, human beings are able to adapt the environment to their own behavior instead of the other way around. But, like the child who must act ethically before she or he is really has any ethics worth speaking of, humans as a species are not yet able to design and plan their own economics, politics, or even their scientific and military behavior. When Sakharov detonated the Moab, there was serious worry that it might start a chain reaction that engulfed all matter in the solar system and possible the universe, but the test went ahead anyway. Similarly, the effects of Starfish Prime were completely unknown when my father's idle speculations to a New York Times reporter were actually carried out. I'm not even sure if this kind of reckless scientism should be called "experimental". But I am sure of one thing: Ethics as such is actually a long-ago yet-to-come.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New in Early Years, co-authored with Fang Li:

When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and maths in the grandmother tongue

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full


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