[Xmca-l] Re: Passions, (Projects?) and Interests

[robsub@ariadne.org.uk]

Fifteen hours a week???

I hope it's not all practicals - the teachers would be exhausted.

In the UK nowadays the very inadequate thing we do in schools is called 
Sex and Relationship Education. The "and Relationship" bit was tacked on 
some time in the 90s or maybe early 2000s, if I recall rightly. They 
missed a trick there - they should have put it the other way round 
"Relationship and Sex Education". A very large lump of the population go 
into a tabloid induced panic as soon as they hear the word "sex", 
especially when related to children, and then fail to hear the "and 
relationship" it.

Rob

On 11/01/2019 07:14, David Kellogg wrote:
> Last July in Geneva, I got into a bit of a tiff with my hosts over 
> whether or not Vygotsky had a theory of emotion. The commonplace 
> position, taken by almost all high Vygotskyans including my 
> francophone friends, is that Vygotsky spent too much of his life 
> developing a theory of thinking and intellect, complexes and concept 
> formation, and when he turned his attention to the lower and higher 
> emotions, that dark side of the moon, it was too late. He worked out a 
> kind of prolegomena, in the form of "Teaching on the Emotions" (or 
> "Study of the Emotions" or perhaps "The Doctrine of the Emotions"--you 
> can read what he did in Volume 6 of the Collected Works). And the rest 
> was silence.
>
> Here in Korea we are bringing out our tenth volume of Vygotsky's works 
> (see attached cover, with blurbs from Renee Van der Veer and Irina 
> Leopoldoff-Martin). It's all about sex education, which is a very 
> important topic here in Korea, because we have fifteen hours of sex 
> education a week mandated by the government, but the ministry of 
> education has more or less withdrawn the downloadable materials for 
> this, not for the usual reasons but instead because of criticism from 
> Human Rights Watch (it is terribly sexist, homophobic, and just plain 
> ignorant).
>
> Vygosky's view is that sex education (which he calls "sexual 
> enlightenment") has to be integrated into ALL subjects (so for example 
> the test of a good sex enlightenment programme would be one that 
> ensures equal participation of boys and girls in math and physics), it 
> has to start as soon as preschoolers enter primary school, and it has 
> to be INTERESTING. In other words, instead of the "sex education 
> without sex" programme we have here in South Korea, we need non-sex 
> education...but with a good deal of sex.
>
> All of which has got me thinking about the problem my Geneva friends 
> set before me. I think that Vygotsky really DOES have a theory that 
> unites passions and interests. It's like that book by Hirschmann on 
> how the unity of passion and interest gave rise to capitalism, but 
> instead it is all about how passions, shared projects, and interests 
> give rise to sexual love, and it is more or less right before we would 
> expect to find it: in the Pedology of the Adolescent, right before the 
> chapter on concept formation, which shows how complexes (which are 
> categories for others) become concepts (categories for themselves). 
> This is the chapter on interests, which explains how passions (which 
> are sensations in themselves) become interests: that is, emotions for 
> themselves. (There is already a passable translation of this in Volume 
> Five of the CW). The only thing is there is a need for a transitional 
> form--a feeling with others. Andy's idea of the Project?
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New in /Language and Literature/, co-authored with Fang Li:
> Mountains in labour: Eliot’s ‘Atrocities’ and Woolf’s alternatives
> Show all authors
>
> https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947018805660 
> <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947018805660>
>
>

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