Jay-- Your statement is too long to deal with on-screen, so more later.
The missing photo on the message line is a photo of what appears to be a classroom in Ur. Right, the
"original city" -- circa 4000bc. A time when changes in modes of production, political organization,
social stratification, etc. accompanied the first "city states," where people other than the kind and
his hencepeople lived off the directly productive labor of others, like scribes. Unlike what you suggest
in what I have read so far, these scribe/teachers did NOT work in an apprenticeship situation. The photo
I have, which was supposed to turn up in an article in the new, ponderous, Handbook of Teaching (Margie
Gallego, principle author) was of a room that looks like 90+ % of the classrooms in the world with
desks facing forward in rows towad a single desk facing backwards "at the front." The only strange feature
was the stand on the side of the room which, instead of a pencil sharpener, had a tablet wetter, so the
scribes-to-be could wet their tablets.
The basic architecture is a 99.9% replica of our distance learning center at UCSD.
The aggregation of people, combined with their roles and some emergent property of "efficiency" (in the name of the
state first and foremost, I suspect) produced the 21st century classroom in -4000 BC. Some of what students
learned their needed no explicit teaching. We call it the hidden curriculum. Others might call it ideology,
or class consciousness, or other like-idead names. What was taught/learned was the three R's tha are not,
in general, discoverable by techniques of cultural transmission previously in place.
This same participation structure and social function and "teaching is needed for learning" idea seems
to be pretty durable. Still around in my university, just ask any student.
Time to head off to other matters and stop banging my head against a stone tablet.
Hasta manana
mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 11 2002 - 09:22:33 PST