[Xmca-l] Re: does this screed have an inkling of merit?

[David Kellogg]

Anthony:

Yes, it's a little hard to imagine what life is like outside
"self-quarantine", much less what life is like outside South Korea just
now. We hardly go out at all, and we are preparing to teach all of our
classes from home, through the internet, in order to stop the spread of the
Corona-19 virus (there is something of a political kerfuffle on what to
call it, because the pro-American anti-Chinese party insists on "Wuhan
Virus", while the government insists on "Corona-19"). Today the government
announced that masks for going out will finally be made available at
pharmacies and post-offices, but only five per customer. I don't really
believe in the effectiveness of masks (they seem to work mostly by keeping
you from touching your mouth and lips rather than by actually standing
between you and the virus). So I mostly just stay in.

>From the point of view of the virus, a body is a body is a body. But from
the point of view of a teacher and even a doctor, a body is not a
virus-carrying body unless it is organized into a vector of infection, and
these infectious vectors look a lot like socio-cultural rather than
biological organisms.

Here's the situation in South Korea (and it may well come to be a situation
near you sooner than you think). Until about two weeks ago, we were just
like any other country--we had a few cases, but they were directly linked
to people arriving from China by airline and they were easily quarantined;
if anything we were better off, because we had SARS and MERS and so we'd
developed a very good institutional "immune response" in the form of a very
solid public health infrastructure. The death rate for C19 is extremely low
(less than one percent here in Korea) so nobody was very concerned. But
then there was a mysterious spike in the city of Daegu (and in fact 82
percent of the cases are still in Daegu and environs). For many days
the Corona-19 cases doubled every single day, from 51 to around six
hundred. This was apparently connected with a church--more of a cult,
really, since the 240,000 members are secretive and believe that their
leader enjoys eternal life. The leader's brother, however, did not enjoy
eternal life--he died, apparently of C19, and his funeral and the hospital
where he died appears to have been a major source of contagion

The right wing opposition, which is largely based in Daegu and in the
churches, continues to blame everything on China and demands that all
arriving Chinese people be sent home. But since the budget cuts and
the half-price tuition reforms were implemented by the liberal government,
Korean universities have become financially dependent on Chinese foreign
students. About 70,000 of them were set to arrive this week, but classes
are now delayed for two weeks, and it looks like only 10,000 students will
arrive in all.

Korea, which supposedly has the highest index of child unhappiness on
earth, was recently listed second, after Norway, among countries that allow
the health and above all the education of children to flourish. But because
of the collapsing birth rate here in South Korea (which is in turn linked
to the high price of having, raising and educating a child) the profession
of teaching is no longer a secure one. So I am often asked to teach classes
which will innoculate my students against the instability of the job
market. For example, last semester I co-taught a class in "Your Specialism
and Start-Ups" with a friend who is a professor of business studies at
Tehran University. The argument my colleague put to the student was that
only about three out of our class of forty will ever manage to become
teachers. But towards the end of the class he admitted that about SEVENTY
PERCENT of start-ups fail within the FIRST YEAR. When you are planning a
life, these statistics are much scarier than the current death rate from
Corona-19. Needless to say, I argued that teaching is still your best
option. But of course that's MY specialism....


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: 'Commentary: On the originality of Vygotsky's "Thought and
Word" i
in *Mind Culture and Activity*
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775
Some free e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SK2DR3TYBMJ42MFPYRFY/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775

New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270



On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 7:56 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
wrote:

> David, thank you.  Extremely interesting response, including some of the
> statements I can't quite follow yet, outsider that I am (e.g., "Cities,
> churches, college campuses and airline companies are simply the forms which
> human biology have taken, and so they are inevitably the conduits through
> which viruses reorganize human biology for their own apparently purposeless
> purposes."  -- Simply?  e.g., "Viral anarchy of the labor market").  I
> don't have the background knowledge to fully understand these metaphors,
> but I think they're intriguing.
>
> And yes, we Americans tend not to be keen on excessive central planning.
>
> This was an interesting read, David.  Thanks again.  Even more so, I
> really enjoyed your Commentary here, re: 'Vygotsky's originality' (which I
> recommend to anyone yet to read it):
> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775?journalCode=hmca20
>
>
> Anthony
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 6:06 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> We are living through a public health emergency here in South Korea. I
>> won't provide the details, which are (fortunately) even more widely
>> available than the virus itself and (unfortunately) far more available than
>> the F94 disposible masks we are supposed to be wearing whenever we go out.
>> Going out is strongly discouraged, and schools, gyms, and even local
>> government facilities remain closed.  But I think that public health
>> emergencies are actually a more useful "lens" (as people in our field like
>> to say these days) through which to read your article than the the author's
>> admittedly irrelevant trip to the beach.
>>
>> First of all, a good public health emergency like this one, or the Broad
>> Street Pump cholera epidemic, the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1980s, and
>> SARS/MERS in the early years of the present millenium) exposes in a very
>> graphic way how inescapable the cultural-historical organization
>> of human biological content is. Cities, churches, college campuses and
>> airline companies are simply the forms which human biology have taken, and
>> so they are inevitably the conduits through which viruses reorganize human
>> biology for their own apparently purposeless purposes. Unlike viruses,
>> markets, and imaginary libertarian/anarchist paradises populated by
>> atomistically inclined "free-thinking individuals" opposed in principle to
>> planned behaviors of any kind, these cultural-historical forms have the
>> great advantage of being potentially conscious, deliberate, and
>> purposeful--i.e. plannable.
>>
>> Secondly, and as a direct result, a good public health emergency like
>> this one also evokes a cultural-historical immune response. Broad Street
>> evoked modern immunology. AIDS/HIV evoked ACT-UP, and this had the indirect
>> result of showiing how inextricably gay people are part of our cities,
>> churches, college campuses and even airline industry and thus helping bring
>> out equal marriage rights. SARS/MERS created the medical infrastructure
>> that is starting to bring the epidemic under control even in Daegu. This
>> morning the leader of the pro-dictatorship pro-American party had to be
>> tested for the virus, because he sat next to the virus-positive leader of a
>> corporatist teachers "union" in a rally; he tested negative, but not before
>> a session of the national assembly had to be cancelled, and then he
>> immediately called a halt to all rallies and asked people to cooperate with
>> the medical establishment instead of travelling all over the country
>> agitating for travel bans on Chinese people.
>>
>> When I was recently in the USA, I noticed (partly under the influence of
>> having to buy short-term medical coverage for myself and my wife) that even
>> Americans are starting to take seriously the idea that health care should
>> not be completely marketized, that more than just  preventive medicine
>> might be usefully nationalized, collectivized, and even planned. The
>> "Common Core" and the National Curriculum which motivates the article you
>> sent around are both similarly American (i.e. similarly tentative and
>> timid) steps in the realization that education might usefully follow suit.
>> I also noticed, however, that very few Americans (including the most "left"
>> of the current candidates for president) would be willing to see
>> plannability extended to other necessities, such as housing,
>> transportation, and basic necessaries of life, let alone the underlying
>> factors of capital and labor. Education does many things, and inevitably
>> some of the things it does can be made to look manipulative and dangerous
>> by free-thinking and free-wheeling proponents of the free market like your
>> author and our own pro-dictatorship pro-American party. But education
>> remains the only cultural-historical immune response to the viral anarchy
>> of the labor market that young people really have.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>>
>> New co-translation, with Nikolai Veresov:
>>
>> ‘L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works: Volume 1. Foundations of Pedology’.
>>
>> Free downloadable PDF with introductory essay, concluding essay.
>> Free summarizing outlines.
>>
>> Book product page: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270
>>
>> The eBook is available here:  https://link.springer.com/
>> book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-0528-7
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 4:25 AM Anthony Barra <anthonymbarra@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> To me, it seems a product of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias,
>>> but I ask sincerely: does anybody find any inklings of merit in this 2014
>>> essay?
>>> http://invisibleserfscollar.com/unveiling-the-true-focus-of-the-common-core-obuchenie-within-students-to-gain-desired-future-behaviors/
>>>
>>> I stumbled upon the article while googling "obuchenie and perezhivanie,"
>>> two terms I'm in the early stages of understanding. The blog's proprietor
>>> writes with a lot of . . . energy. (And perhaps, a cocktail of hubris and
>>> pseudoconcepts - http://tiny.cc/dpbgkz )
>>>
>>> To briefly add, for whatever it's worth: I am probably more familiar
>>> with the (somewhat paranoid) style of argumentation in the attached essay
>>> than I am with the finer points of cultural-historical theory.  But I'm not
>>> a very refined consumer of either.
>>>
>>> The blogger writes in a style I'm not particularly fond of -- i.e.,
>>> wielding a sword and swinging it around wildly.  Amidst the wild swinging,
>>> I ask: does any of it hit?
>>>
>>> I'd be interesting in any productive thoughts at all.
>>>
>>> Thanks ~
>>> Anthony
>>>
>>
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