[Xmca-l] Re: useful psychology?

[JULIE WADDINGTON]

David,

Thank you for this. I was recently talking to a practising psychologist friend about teacher training. The conversation led her to tell me about efforts being made in some circles (she mentioned the national college of psychologists) to make psychometric tests compulsory to be able to access university teacher training: candidates deemed 'unsuitable' would be denied access. I was very uncomfortable with this idea for many reasons. The information you share gives me more reasons to doubt the 'usefulness' of such tests and to worry about their potential application.

I'll keep your reply on file in case we (those in teacher training) need to argue the case against psychotechnic selection at some point.

Julie




Dra. Julie Waddington
Departament de Didàctiques Específiques
Facultat d'Educació i Psicologia
Universitat de Girona





________________________________
De: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] en nom de David Kellogg [dkellogg60@gmail.com]
Enviat el: dimecres, 15 / gener / 2020 05:09
Per a: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Tema: [Xmca-l] Re: useful psychology?

But psychotechnics was really the Soviet version of human resource management. The idea was to select particular "types" for particular jobs. It wasn't really a Soviet idea--it started in Germany (and in fact, the Nazis were very big on it; the selection ramp at Auschwitz was based on it). In China, there was also quite a bit of emphasis on making sure that people suited the professions chosen for them, as education was a very scarce resource.

Isaac Spielrein--Sabine's brother, who was a colleague of Vygotsky--was a psychotechnician; his essay on the language of the Red Army soldier is written with that perspective in mind. And it was at a psychotechnic conference that Vygotsky was asked if there could be a pedology of adults, to aid in psychotechnic selection.

Vygotsky said no.

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 Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 1:02 PM mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu<mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>> wrote:
Might you be looking for “psychotechnics” Andy?
Mike

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 7:35 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com<mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
Andy--

That really doesn't sound like Vygotsky to me.

Yes, he refers to art as the "social technique of emotion" (Psychology of Art). Yes, he did experiments on reading "Gentle Breath" to see if Bunin's short story had any affect on breathing rates. But as far as I know he had nothing to do with Luria's work on lie detectors (in The Nature of Human Conflict), and he was even rather skeptical of Luria's work on optical illusions in "uneducated" peoples

. Remember, this is the guy who denied that a general psychology could ever cut itself off from practice and vice versa (History of the Crisis in Psychology), who rejected the idea that thinking is speech with the sound turned off (Thinking and Speech). Besides, who ever heard of a technology opposed to an epistemology? What would that mean? A hand without a brain?

Vygotsky sounds more like this: "Neither the hand nor the brain left to itself can do much."  Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), Book 1, Aphorism 2.

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



On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:49 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:

There's somewhere where Vygotsky talks about psychology as a technology as opposed to (for example) an epistemology. Can anyone point me to where this observation is to be found. I can find it with my search engines. I think Vygotsky and Luria's invention of the lie-detector has been mentioned in this connection.

Andy


--
________________________________
Andy Blunden
Hegel for Social Movements<https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
Home Page<https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
--
 fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of “as if”, therein lies its true   function and its potential for effecting change - R. Ellison
---------------------------------------------------
For archival resources relevant to the research of myself and other members of LCHC, visit
lchc.ucsd.edu<http://lchc.ucsd.edu>.  For a narrative history of the research of LCHC, visit lchcautobio.ucsd.edu<http://lchcautobio.ucsd.edu>.


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