Re: [xmca] Obama's Learn Act

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Mike,

The reference to "deep psychological factors" was in Suppes' article, I believe. I should probably explain that I came across Siegfried Bernfeld's work while trying to identify the Bernfeld to whom LSV gives credit for the proposal that after birth the neonate is an "exoparasite." I'm not certain whether or not this is the same person, but it's quite likely, since Siegfried Bernfeld (1892-1953), born in the Ukraine, was a psychologist influenced both by Marx and by Freud. What first struck me in his account of education was this:

"Children must learn to love the bourgeoisie, and their love must be so deeply ingrained in them that a whole life of want and slavery cannot extinguish it. What in fact is forced exploitation must be made to appear to them as a voluntary and sacrificial offering of love. They have to produce surplus value, but they must do it gladly, as if compelled by love, much as a lover waits upon his beloved or a religious believer in his god." (Bernfeld, 1973, p. 70)
[Cited here: <http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pdf/freetoview.asp?j=pfie&vol=3&issue=2&year=2005&article=6_Sunker_PFIE_3_2_web>]

These words remind me of Paul Willis' powerful analysis in his book Learning to Labor; they hint at the cultural production within the schools that serves and feeds into persistent networks of social reproduction and then economic production. It seems to me that few of us manage to articulate the paradoxes and contradictions of the educational system and its links to these networks, but it is these that prevent change. Suppes concludes that a rational solution to problems in education can never be achieved, for its central conflicts cannot be solved, they must be negotiated. 

Martin

 
> the relation of this social condition to "deep
> psychological factors" I take to be the matter of some dispute.
> 
> mike
> 

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