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

[David Kellogg]

Sorry, Rob. I mean fifteen hours a year. The government has itinerant
specialists who lecture from school to school. There is even a bus for
visiting the provinces.

In contrast, Vygotsky says:

a) No class with ONLY sex education--since anatomical, sexual, and
sociocultural maturation do not coincide in modern humans, sex education is
not a science of a natural whole, where the object of study is given to us.

b) No classes WITHOUT sex education--since sex education is simply learning
how to be with people who may be of sexual interest, all classes must have
some form of sexual "enlightenment".

c) No sex education without INTEREST. But what, exactly, is interest?

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




On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 5:40 PM robsub@ariadne.org.uk <robsub@ariadne.org.uk>
wrote:

> 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
>
>
>
>
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