Re: [xmca] Sumerian school pic

Its important to note that ideology of schooling/virtue/intelligence/class
that went with the first schools are ALSO
still with us today.

What school of education in the world studies schooling starting from the
empirical fact that formal schooling since its
origins (in the West at least, perhaps David K can fill us in on China,
Korea, ....) have been modes of state domination,
class exacerbation and exploitation and most crucially, that FAILURE IS A
FUNDAMENTAL SYSTEMIC PROPERTY OF
FORMAL SCHOOLING.... it is not a mistake, negligence, etc.

The, and only then, can a disucssion of school "re-form" that includes state
re-form and political economic re-form have
a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. No school of ed i know of starts
from this germ cell.

mikd

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 3:35 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> Great stuff Andy, thanks for sharing. I used the attached picture from my
> Aunt Alice's Brooklyn elementary school classroom on the cover of The
> Discourse of Character Education. From the early 1920s.
>
> Peter, when I worked as Teaching Space Coordinator at
> Melbourne University, I collected the following set:
> http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/tss/archive/history.html
> from Sumeria to 1979, and for now:
> http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/tss/archive/cls2.html
> Andy
> Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
> > I first saw Mike use the Sumerian classroom slide a few years ago at a
> > conference in Miami, and he has been kind enough to share it. I've used
> it
> > several times to make the point that Mike originally made: that the
> > traditions of schooling run very deep. I used it at ISCAR, and the text
> for
> > the talk included the observation that while desks are no longer made of
> > stone and rarely are bolted to the floor anymore, they still tend to sit
> in
> > the same formation as they did 6,000 years ago. The irony: In the USCD
> > classroom in which I gave the talk, the seats were indeed bolted to the
> > floor.
> >
> > To give a sense of just how old the Sumerian classroom is, I put together
> > the following. It still boggles my mind:
> >
> > In his consideration of the developmental consequences of education, Cole
> > (2005) takes a cross-cultural and historical perspective that leads him
> back
> > to the earliest classrooms of Indo-European civilization. Based on the
> > arrangement of a Sumerian classroom from roughly 4,000 BCE, he surmises
> that
> > the last 6,000 years have seen great continuity in educational practice
> in
> a
> > number of regards (see Figure 1.1; reprinted from Cole, 2005, p. 200). As
> > the photograph reveals, students sat in rows-here, fixed in
> stone-possibly
> > chiseling notes in a proto-cuneiform script and undoubtedly facing the
> > teacher. This template, in spite of other developments in teaching
> practice,
> > has served to guide instruction in most Western educational settings from
> > (at least) the Uruk period of Sumerian civilization through the present.
> > ________________________
> > Place Figure 1.1 about here
> > ________________________
> > This classroom was built toward the end of the Stone Age, as the
> Neolithic
> > Period was about to give way to the Bronze Age. Students occupied its
> seats
> > 1,400 years before the legendary King Gilgamesh is believed to have ruled
> > the land; 2,300 years before Hammurabi founded the city of Babylon and
> wrote
> > the first code of law; and 3,400 years before Nebuchadnezzar II is
> believed
> > to have built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is as old as the idea of
> > formal teaching and learning in the history of human social life.
> >
> > (this is from the first draft of a book chapter I'm developing, so please
> > reference to this message if you borrow the phrasing)
> >
> > Sorry I forgot to attach this to message in response to Paul.
> > The earliest known classroom in the "western" world.
> > mike
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>+61 3 9380 9435
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Received on Thu Dec 11 06:39:47 2008