Re: [xmca] Sumerian school pic

Ah- Perhaps the source of my so erroneous ways. I'll have to find a more
appropriate roll model. Thanks for the advice. These media affects afflict
the old as well as the young it seems.
mike

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 8:44 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Ugh, Dickens. An insufficiently repressed pedophile. When he was my age, he
> threatened the mother of his overnumerous children with incarceration in a
> mental institution, dumped his sister-in-law, with whom he was having a
> doubly adulterous affair, and moved in with a teen-age actress. Kind of
> takes the shine off those Christmas Stories, doesn't it?
>
> My wife recommends Gaskell as an antidote. Elizabeth Gaskell has really
> wonderful things to say about women (Wives and Daughters) education (My Lady
> Ludlow) and above all social revolution (Mary Barton and especially North
> and South). I also think she was one of the first real psychological
> novelists, who tried to contrast verbal thinking with genuinely unconcious
> thought processes.
>
> As her boss, Dickens was responsible for various editorial crimes against
> her work (just compare Hard Times to North and South!) But he had a word of
> advice for her husband as well: "Fearful, fearful, Mrs. Gaskell! If I were
> Mr. G, how I would beat her!"
>
> dk
>
> --- On *Thu, 12/11/08, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Sumerian school pic
> To: vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> Cc: "xmca" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 8:31 PM
>
>
> Hi David--
>
> I prefer optimism to pessimism, and your ideas about combined and uneven
> development. I will have to work at the problem more because I am unsure
> of the germ cells "vs" unit of analysis issue.
>
> I do not think I used the term social reproduction, did I? I did say that
> failure
> was intrinsic to all mass formal education systems that I know about. Might
> it
> be that this idea and the idea of combined and uneven development are not
> incompatible? Maybe even related?
>
> The introduction of Trotsky into the discussion is also timely and
> interesting
> in light of Paul's earlier comments LSV's ideas about development (as I
> understand them, which involves both combined and uneven development. Paul
> was correct in saying that my remarks applied to the past, up to now. But
> now is changing --- very rapidly indeed-- to my aging senses (it were ever
> so, i guess). Might not a future society be created with a form of mass
> schooling where it makes no sense to say that all the children are above
> average but no one fails? Could there be mass schooling that did not involve
> failure, as there was enculturation that did not involve failure among
> hunter-gatherer groups? I would like to think so. I would even like to live
> to see it.
>
> Maybe I have been reading too much Dickens. He is my constant nightly
> companion. I have kicked that picture of dangling ass off of my web page
> since my current work capacity would not allow me even to get into such a
> predicament but think I will perhaps replace it with some Dickens. Not on
> schooling, but on the causes of the French revolution and its general
> message for humankind.
>
> Thanks for the food for thought.
> mike
> more on
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 6:50 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> Mike--
>>
>> I guess I think that saying that schools and classrooms are just tools for
>> social reproduction and that failure is intrinsic to this process is a
>> little like saying that minds are just tools for social reproduction and
>> that the destruction of minds is intrinsic to this process. Yeah, it's
>> all true. Except for the part that goes "just".
>>
>> Andy pointed out that even the Chartist movement inscribed compulsory
>> education on its banner, and that it's been part of every single workers
>> movement since Adam wove and Eve delved. Every social revolution worthy of
>> the name has found its future in mass literacy and universal education; my
>> own mother in law's biggest regret in life was that at thirty she was
>> considered too old for middle school.
>>
>> I think my view of the "germ cell" idea is a little different from yours,
>> or anyway from Davydov's. Davydov uses the "germ cell" to talk about a kind
>> of "inward out" unfolding of a concept, the child's ability to discover the
>> universal in the particular. But I see it as more related to Vygotsky's
>> "unit of analysis" and Marx's "commodity".
>>
>> The school and the classroom and even the mind are "germ cells" not
>> because they contain within all the horrors of a developed capitalist
>> society to be outwardly unfolded, but rather because each is made of the
>> same materials as the fully developed society that surrounds it (words,
>> voices, concepts). Because they find themselves in an already developed
>> society, minds in classrooms and schools develop from the outside inwards.
>>
>> I think that development in schools is mostly what Trotsky would
>> call "uneven and combined development", the sort experienced by Russia and
>> China, which developed from outside inwards rather than the sort experienced
>> by England and Germany, which developed their own forms of finance
>> industrial capital before exporting them.
>>
>> I think a special feature of this uneven and combined development is
>> extreme functional differentiation: certain planes of the mind are more
>> closely aligned with social reproduction, and others with social progress.
>> Still others are rather more subject to volition than a social
>> reproductionist view of education can admit.
>>
>> That functional differentiation extends well beyond the mind: in my own
>> field, I find that those of us interested in classroom teaching are much
>> less interested in the gestation of failure than my colleagues who do
>> assessment.
>>
>> Even when I look at dynamic assessment, I find that the view taken of the
>> zone of proximal development in assessment literature is a lot more
>> conservative than my own; it presupposes, as it must, a "right solution"
>> rather than an open ended process.
>>
>> I'm not saying I'm right and they're wrong; when I first came to Korea I
>> was offered a testing position which I initially refused, and my wife
>> persuaded me to take it with words to the effect that the moment she sat the
>> college entrance exam was the last time in her life she was ever really
>> treated in a nationality, gender and class neutral manner by anyone. It is
>> easy to say that in this she was deluded, but the truth is that she passed,
>> else we never would have met.
>>
>> Spolsky points out that the Regents and then the SATs were initially
>> developed to try to keep (Eastern European) Jews out of good schools in the
>> USA. The British, you know, simply banned them, but then they went and set
>> up King's College London and so on. What could Americans do to make sure
>> that those immigrants from the East did not snag all the good spots in
>> school?
>>
>> Not exactly a total success, was it? The same thing is happening with the
>> use of English proficiency exams (e.g. for international TAships). They are
>> really designed to keep out Asians (and in fact the New Zealand government
>> actually ran a scheme where they allowed Chinese immigrants into the country
>> "on spec" and forced them to pay 20,000 pounds if they couldn't pass a
>> proficiency exam at the end of the year!). With the same kind of success,
>> I'm pleased to say. Maybe even testing is subject to uneven and combined
>> development and functional differentiation. I know that classrooms and
>> minds are.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>> --- On *Thu, 12/11/08, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>>
>> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Sumerian school pic
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 6:38 AM
>>
>> 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
>> > >
>> > > _______________________________________________
>> > > xmca mailing list
>> > > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>
>> > > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>
>> > >
>> >
>> > --
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> > Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
>> <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>+61 3 9380 9435
>> > Skype andy.blunden
>> > Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
>> > http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm
>> >
>> > ______________________________
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Received on Fri Dec 12 06:34:32 2008