Unlike Andy, I was amused. I was particularly amused by the
suggestion that sex education be replaced by licensing a Japanese
porn channel, so that children have to figure out how to make the
beast with two backs by watching unclothed salarymen eat sushi off
of naked secretaries. That should give young imaginations a
workout.. If you look at the right margin of the essay you will
see another piece that advocates the creation of cigarettes which
will kill us absolutely painlessly at the moment of retirment, and
thus save companies billions on pensions. As the article advertises
in its opening sentences, it's really not about education at all;
it's about budget cuts, and it is in its way just as effective as
the sort of thing thta Megan Fox and her boyfriend are doing in
California. So I think that the article is a little like the
character "bamboo" written with a bamboo brush, a kind of Zen
example of what it proposes. It's a piece of Speiss, an
entertainment with a very small dose of truth mixed in and mixed up
and spread out to the point where it is largely useless except as a
good romp, a good rant, a good intellectual rumpus.
Games are already part of school, of course. Our own Wagner Luiz
Schmit is already doing some very interesting work along these
lines. There is a school in Sweden which teaches entirely through
role play games (but these are generally NOT of the online variety,
and they can involve, for example, rousing the boarding students in
the middle of the night to go and translate simulated telegrammes
from German to English so that the "captain" can decide whether or
not to alter course to help rescue a sinking ship. Yongho Kim, my
former graduate student, figured out a way to replace the cartoon
animations in our CD ROM textbook with "avatars" created from
photographs of the children themselves. Interestingly, he
discovered that the third and fourth graders were extremely
motivated and anxious to have their avatars on view, but the fifth
and sixth graders sometimes asked that the teacher use the original
characters instead. This suggests that avatars follow the basic
laws that govern anything else having to do with the fragile
"invisible friend" that is the child's developing self: what is
developmentally positive at one moment will grow to negate itself
in the next. Yes, it is certainly true that major corporations in
Korea have "teams" for playing internet RPG games and that kids
know the star players and revere them. But it is equally true that
in Korea internet addiction is recognized as a very serious social
problem, and there is a good deal more on internet addiction in
school books and ad campaigns that target children than, say, drugs
or sex education.
I was much more interested in the article's remarks on the
sociogenesis of public schooling, actually. I agree with the author
that compulsory schooling is a modern invention; I note that he
correctly identified its Prussian origins, and the fact that it was
from the inception connected with supplying literate labor for
factory work. But above all I agree with the idea that prior to
schooling there was a spontaneous, or "everyday" zone of proximal
development evolving on the playground, brought into being by
children of different developmental stages playing the same game. I
also agree with the idea that in this spontaneously generated zone
of proximal development, imaginary tigers replaced real dangers,
that ONE of the functionalist sources of play was to avoid the
inevitable attrition that "learning through discovery" led to in
primitive peoples, although I tend to think this was an exaptation
rather than an initial design feature. So much for the idea that
the zone of proximal development only exists in schools. The
deliberately engineered zone is a very recent invention and so in
some ways it is not a very good one yet. But of course, the same
thing could be said of the internet.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Sat, 4/10/10, Colette Murphy <c.a.murphy@qub.ac.uk> wrote:
From: Colette Murphy <c.a.murphy@qub.ac.uk>
Subject: [xmca] abolish schools?
To: "lchcmike@gmail.com" <lchcmike@gmail.com>, "eXtended Mind,
Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, April 10, 2010, 2:24 AM
Please see this article - I'd be very grateful for any feedback,
particularly re the comments pertaining to Korea...
Thanks a lot
colette
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/if-i-ruled-the-world-8/
Dr Colette Murphy
Senior Lecturer
School of Education
Queen's University
Belfast BT7 1NN
tel: 02890975953
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