[Xmca-l] Corporal Punishment

[David Kellogg]

Dear Simangele,

Thanks for the heartfelt (and head-felt) article on punishment of the body
and collateral damage of the mind. Here in South Korea, we abolished
corporal punishment back in 2011 in the schools, but it thrived in homes
until the National Assembly passed a law in early January of this year.
This was largely in response to some truly horrible instances of parents
murdering their children in lockdown.  Now corporal punishment is
forbidden in the home as well.

You know, curiosity (which I think is the correct translation of French
"admiration") was one of the key differences between Descartes and Spinoza
in Vygotsky's "Teaching on Emotions". Descartes thought that curiosity was
the precondition for all other emotions, because it has no judgement of
good or bad and also because it comes in a moment of phenomenological
astonishment (it is the only emotion that doesn't have an opposite). He
thought that curiosity creates the precondition for the exercise of free
will.

Spinoza disagreed on every point--"admiration" is not an emotion at all,
precisely because it involves neither understanding nor judgement of good
or bad and has no opposite, and of course Spinoza doesn't believe in free
will. It is the moment of "perezhivanie", or construing meaning, that
actually creates the precondition for understanding and learning; this has
to come after not before or with the experience of curiosity. And that TOO
is an argument against corporal punishment: if body and mind are one, how
can the mind construe when the body is in pain?

The other day in my class on "Jazz and American Culture" we were discussing
whether the rhythms and melodies of Africa could have survived the corporal
punishment and genocide of slavery. Because my students don't really know
much about contemporary African music I asked them to listen to Bright
Chimezie. He is a Nigerian musician and campaigner against corporal
punishment in schools. As you can see, he's also a campaigner against--and
in--English! (And as you can see the solution is not quite as simple as he
seems to think--just substituting "ah", "bay", "say" for "A, B, C"!)

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7mpvF5sTrA__;!!Mih3wA!VtIXeAWb2alolE6ziU-gMTM4dU07zJYOkV6W1jqqGeOs_GO6oB30O7p4d1zQnpNsIgbBmQ$ 


David Kellogg
Sangmyung University
,

New Article with Song Seon-mi in Early Years:

Un-naming names: Using Vygotsky’s language games and Halliday’s grammar to
study how children learn how names are made and unmade

Some free e-prints available at:

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/2C9HCKGJEYNVEKUGHYKV/full?target=10.1080*09575146.2020.1853682__;Lw!!Mih3wA!VtIXeAWb2alolE6ziU-gMTM4dU07zJYOkV6W1jqqGeOs_GO6oB30O7p4d1zQnpMh3aKhPg$ 

New book forthcoming in 2021:

L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Vol. II: The Problem of Age.
Translated with Prefatory Notes and Outlines by Nikolai Veresov and David
Kellogg
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20210316/4384aea1/attachment.html