How might gender issues play into this conversation? Has anyone read The
Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by
Leonard Shlain?
Molly
Jay Lemke wrote:
>
>
> THANKS, Mike, for the pointer to the Oxford talk slides. I always like
> that image of Sumerican classrooms looking both like our own and (in
> their excavated state) like some mud-baked morgue or common grave .....
>
> I think that we do have a modestly good idea about how schooling
> co-evolved with the later periods of social organization, especially
> specialization for clerical and management work. It's that still
> earlier, initial emergent epoch that I'm trying to slim down to its
> essentials. At some point there was an explosion in the need for more
> scribes, and that certainly seems to have produced schools as we
> still, alas, know them. But what about just before that ....
>
> The earliest literacy we seem to know about was record-keeping. And
> maybe orders-at-a-distance. With large-scale societies we had a
> centripetal flow of reports, and a centrifugal flow of commands. But
> before that ...
>
> I am trying to imagine some analogue, some precursor of schools before
> literacy, or at least before bureaucratic literacy.
>
> The ethnographic reports that you cite credibly indicate that
> smaller-scale, less socially differentiated societies did not do
> explicit teaching outside apprenticeship, or outside a kind of LPP.
> But that comes from looking for our ideas of "schooling", not
> necessarily for their possible analogues, same functions by different
> means, or corresponding functions by different means. I am starting to
> wonder about storytellers and elders as "living libraries", about
> meetings to discuss the hunt or the next migration as places where
> there was also an information-sharing that created a sort of
> "distributed knowledge-base" among overlapping groups and smaller
> bands that came together at longish intervals for "ceremonial"
> get-togethers.
>
> Even small numbers in population can still be aggregating and
> depending on information about a large territory that they have
> collective but not direct individual knowledge of. There must have
> been "repositories" in some sense for this accumulating knowledge, and
> there must have been ways to add to it and access it, and there must
> have been something like "reading" and "writing" practices --- the
> practices needed to participate usefully in the knowledge store,
> interpretative practices/knowledge.
>
> I can readily enough create a definition of literacy that depends on
> generalizations of what we know as writing ... a kind of "literate"
> culture before writing. And so I am trying to imagine what the
> analogue of "school" might have been ... trying to get back to a
> mythical branching point, where there were many proto-school
> institutions, only one of which evolved into schooling as we know it
> once written literacy came to serve the tallying and rallying needs of
> Sumer.
>
> This is not just an historical mythologizing. Hopefully it is a way of
> constituting the starting point for explorations of alternatives.
> Sumer built big and baked hard, but it was probably not the only game
> in town ... and I'll bet that none of the alternatives has been
> completely lost since that time ... somewhere the recessive memes are
> still reproducing in our culture today, waiting for the right
> environmental conditions to express themselves more boldly.
>
> Nobel geneticist George Beadle bred modern corn back to its
> pre-domesticated maize ancestors ... from which one could then recover
> much of the genetic potential of the species that had been lost to our
> selective self-interest.
>
> JAY.
>
> At 11:29 AM 12/16/2002 -0800, you wrote:
>
>> Social aggregration and modes of life that require coordination that
>> cannot
>> be handled by other means begAT schooling, by my interpretation, Jay.
>> How
>> humanity can save itself from its own cleverness is a question I have
>> not
>> figured out!
>> mike
>> PS-- See paper on lchc.ucsd.edu/people/mike cole from oxford re these
>> issues
>
>
>
> ---------------------------
> JAY L. LEMKE
> Educational Studies
> University of Michigan
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA
> http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jaylemke
> ---------------------------
>
>
>
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