To be specific, I just add some comments to quotes
from Phil's note:
>I read J. E. Stone's article on "developmentalism", forwarded to the list
>by Ilda Carreiro King, with intense fascination. On the surface it sounds
>so similar to my personal concerns about certain kinds of constructivist
>teaching, yet it is so profoundly distorted underneath.
I also felt this fascination. Only after Therese Foote's remark that
our German universities might be more alike the caricature I gave (of
Stone's already pointed picture) than the US schools, I realized that
a long-standing uneasiness with the way our uni culture has developed
was behind this fascination.
>The dichotomy that really structures the argument, I believe, is original
>goodness versus original sin, with developmentalism being identified with
>original goodness and the author's nameless alternative being identified
>with original sin. ...
That's fitting, I had not thought of that... Hmmm, gets one to think.
>... Vygotsky's theory of the appropriation
>of cultural forms of activity is "developmentalist" in asserting that learning
>only takes place through active appropriation, and it is not-developmentalist
>in assuming that learning only takes place through the appropriation of
>historically specific cultural forms. Vygotsky's theory is thus, in this one
>sense anyway, the synthesis of the thesis-and-antithesis of Stone's article.
Yes, indeed ! Culture is a mediator between self-restraints against the
original sin and self-releasing development of the immanent good potentials.
It both defines what is bad or good, as well as provides the means for
both poles of giving patterning to one's stream of desires and actions.
>I'll leave it to the Vico, Dewey, and the other alleged developmentalists to
>determine whether Stone has treated them accurately.
I find this "slight editing error in the final paragraph" very charming
and fruitful: Let the voices of those elders defend themselves...
>.... At the same time, I can
>very well understand how an argument like Stone's could have political efficacy
>in reactionary organizing against the American public school system. To the
>extent that developmentalism really is taught in teacher education programs,
>or to the extent that student teachers could misunderstand what they are being
>taught in that way, the public schools are, in my opinion, doomed.
As in my posting in answering King Beach, my present interest is
actually in the possible ways how government people and school leaders
could re-organise such a bureaucratic Leviathan like the German school
system. We do not have powerful reactionary factions here, however, so
the aspect of a possible bolstering of their position by admitting that
Stone points to a real problematic common to both educational cultures,
albeit on different levels of the system, does not concern me much.
And adding in the direction where Jay sits at his terminal around
midnight: The recent exchange cleared up, I hope, where differences
between present day Europe and the US of America are to be found,
and how hard it is to see also the common factors...
April sun outside, smiling: Arne.