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

[robsub@ariadne.org.uk]

Fifteen hours a year sounds more reasonable :-)

The contrast between Vygotsky, as in your summary (all that is new to 
me, so thank you for that), and what actually happens, at least here, 
could not be more stark. This is one of those areas where the audit 
culture fails us really badly.

Audit culture is primarily suited to turning out workers, not people or 
citizens - hence relationship and sex education, among other teachable 
things, doesn't feature highly. It aids the employability agenda, with 
its own internal contradiction of needing workers who use their 
initiative to do their jobs profitably but are otherwise wholly and 
uniformly compliant.

And the actual effects may be self contradictory - I have just been 
reading some research whch suggests that the people trackers Amazon uses 
in its warehouse may reduce productivity. People are not automatons, 
whoda thunk it.

To revert to the basics of CHAT, the box that gets ticked has become the 
object rather than the tool, and it shows no sign of giving up that 
position. What will it take to shift it?

Rob


On 11/01/2019 10:57, David Kellogg wrote:
> 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 
> <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947018805660>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 5:40 PM robsub@ariadne.org.uk 
> <mailto:robsub@ariadne.org.uk> <robsub@ariadne.org.uk 
> <mailto: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
>>     <https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963947018805660>
>>
>>
>

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