>Molly-- What is the thesis of this book? Is there a precise available a
>la the precis of the book on class and lang? Then folks could either follow
>up on their own or we could see about a review.
>
>King-- ditto.
>mike
Sure...
Cohen describes how arithmetic, perhaps a quintessential school
subject, actually played little part in the curricula of early public
schooling in colonial America. If you wanted to formally learn
arithmetic in colonial America you hired a private tutor who
advertised their services in newspapers and billboards. Only those
who wanted a future in commerce choose to take up the actual study of
arithmetic. Mind you, others did what we would probably today call
arithmetic, but at that time it wasn't considered to be such unless
your formally studied it. If I remember her argument correctly,
Cohen suggests the introduction of a decimal-based monetary system
(pounds and shillings would no longer do) and the arrival of a
government that believed education (schools) should be widespread as
a way of preparing future American citizens drove arithmetic into the
schools, such that today arithmetic knowledge is seen in the U.S. to
be largely a function of schooling.
The tie to Jay's musing is that to understand how schools came to be
in particular societies, it may be necessary to understand how
schools that were generally of limited importance early on in the
history of any society came to appropriate entire domains of
knowledge and practice as their own.
My favorite but sad example of this is when the formally unschooled
elders of my village in Nepal explained to me that they did not do
Hisaab (arithmetic), though I knew that by my standards, they were
far faster and more accurate at doing arithmetic calculations than I
was. On probing, they provided the clear explanation that what they
do with numbers used to be Hisaab, but with the advent of formal
schooling in the village in the 1970's, Hisaab became that which you
learned in school, and what they did with numbers was now considered
to be andaji (guestimation) or lato ko hisaab (dumb person's math).
--King
-- ______________________________ King Beach Learning, Technology and Culture Michigan State University phone: 517-381-8884 fax: 517-381-8885 email: kdbeach@msu.edu
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