[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [xmca] Vygotsky, Suzuki, and Carl Orff

Many thanks to all !

2009/9/18, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>:
>
> I feel strongly that Vygotsky would be opposed to the Suzuki method on
> several grounds:
>
> a) Suzuki is naturalistic. He makes an explicit parallel between music
> education with native language learning and everyday, spontaneous concepts.
> Vygotsky argues that foreign language learning and science concepts
> represent the next zone of  development for school age children.
>
> b) Suzuki is personalisic. He is heavily based on individual tutelage,
> along the lines of the "teacher-pupil" duet which Vygotsky condemns in the
> "Preface to Thorndike".
>
> c) Suzuki is elitist. He invests heavily (literally and figuratively) in
> the bourgeois family, and this has made it peculiarly susceptible to the
> kind of elitist education schemes Vygotsky abhorred.
>
> I am not so sure about the Orff Schulwerke method. Orff ran a gymnasium in
> Germany in 1925 and Vygotsky may or may not have been aware of his work. On
> the one hand, Orff method teaching rejects naturalism, personalism, and
> elitism and embraces something that is very clearly a community of practice
> (with peripheral participatory roles for very young children). On the other,
> Orff makes an explicitly parallel between musical phylogenesis and
> ontogenesis that Vygotsky would probably not be comfortable with.
>
> Of course, Orff's later relationship with Nazism, which, like Wagner's, was
> not unrelated to his views about phylogeny and ontogeny in music, was
> something Vygotsky could not have known about. In fact, we still don't
> really know about it ourselves. On the one hand, Orff wrote music that was
> highly appreciated by the Nazis and took Nazi commissions that other
> musicians would not touch with a barge pole (e.g. the de-Judification of
> Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream"). On the other, he was close friends
> with the founders of the White Rose, Orff claimed to have been a White Rose
> member himself, and I think it is quite possible.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca