Quite different I think is the insistence early on in education,
when students seem to naturally construct their meanings with
more use of drawings and gestures and acting out relationships,
that _only_ the verbal expression has value in the school setting.
Similarly, that the sources of information that are considered
most valid are the words of the teacher and the words of a text,
and not visual images, direct observation of nature and social
activity, experiments, or even technical graphical representations.
That this is true in the teaching of science is particularly
disgraceful, but very characteristic of the continuing contradiction
between the status of the humanities as purely verbal-mental and so
essentially upper-middle-class, vs. technical occupations of a
lesser status, and the rising status of science (which is at heart
far more technical and practical than is good for it in the
intellectual marketplace of high-brow mental laborers).
This contradiction is resolved within science by the separation
of theoretical science from experimental and applied science
(a purely ideological separation as is easily demonstrated,
e.g. by Latour's early work), with higher status accorded the
former. And also by the 'verbalization' of science (or should
we say its 'textualization') not only in teaching methods, but
even in the emphasis on algebraic mathematization, which is
far closer to verbal-language semiotically than is the equally
valuable, and less taught, geometrical-spatial-graphical mode
of scientific representation. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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