>I proposed a stronger symmetry: that adult culture and child
>culture are each equally well adapted to their environments, that
>the whole human developmental trajectory is adaptive, not just
>its adult moments.
I wonder how strongly you mean this. I would agree that children are
miraculously adapted developmentally to their worlds, but that means to
human social life in which adults and adults' artifacts play a leading role
in their survival as well as their development. Left alone at two or
three, children literally could not survive. I recognize that by age 5 or
6 (perhaps even younger?), some children survive and fend for themselves in
human societies, but my sense is that when this happens it is more
catastrophic than empowering.
I'm interested in the constellation of terms that have surfaced in the
multiple threads dealing with these issues: power, coercion, abuse,
freedom, pain, shame, transmission, engagement. One term that I haven't
seen foregrounded much is social responsibility.
As cultural beings, it seems that a freedom/coercion dichotomy isn't a very
appropriate scale for our realities. Children, in one fashion or another,
will be shaped powerfully by their social worlds and those worlds are ones
in which adults (present and past) play a dominant role. The point here is
not that we are the ones with power, but that we bear a profound
responsiblity to the present and future.
So to add this perspective to Chuck's comments on engagement:
>>So, to repeat, perhaps rather than wondering about how much we
>>dislike coercion or whether lectures were good or bad for the mind or
>>whether some people should be guiding others, we might wonder about what
>>gets students involved and engaged and mentally growing, and more
>>particularly how do we get them involved in the rich and useful domains
>>developed by many people previously who found those domains rich and
>>rewarding.
with a CHAT perspective on development, how do we define and enact our
responsibilities?
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign