Infant: Direct emotional contact
Toddler: Early Manipulation of objects
Preschool: Role playing
Early Elementary: Formal learning
Late Elementary-Early Adolescence: Intimate personal relations
Late Adolescence: Vocational or career oriented activity
Gardner makes a similar argument at this lifestage, but what El'konin and
Gardner both point to and Leon doesn't is the uniqueness of the late
elementaty/early adolescence stage. Botstein warns. "Let's try to fix it
before it's too late, while there's still something left to build on.". I
take this as a reforming of public education itself rather dismantleing the
system. These are arguments Bill has mentioned in the past in reference to
school to work programs. In Ed Psych, Vygotsky refers to Blomskii work on
merging school and adult activity, but offers a quote by Blomskii of all
the horrid things ocurring in the name of the Blomskii method including
child labor. My point being while I think it may be important to go down
that road but we can not be ahistorical about it. Such a road needs to be
in public scrutiny and as we know all too well public education is the best
place for that.
I think many of the more developmental stuff Vygotsky wrote in "Child
Psychology" is very interesting in the context of the struggles we are
facing today. Vygotsky refers to the transition of early adolescence and
late adolescence as an age of crisis in which the whole psychological
(emotional, cognitive, social) essence of the child is being transformed.
While we have historical epoch groupings - early elementary, middle school
etc - that is weakly consistant with Vygotsky's ideas, the quality of those
groupings do not differ so much. The style of instruction and organization
of the environment does not differ radically at these various historical
epochs. In viewing video tapes of some contemporary Russian programs
based on Vygotsky's ideas the qualititative differences at different epochs
has been interesting.
While as Molly mentioned we have schools because we needed to have some
place for the kids, which has a level of truth for those older than 16, I
think we also need to be concerned that the motivation behind the
vocational aspect is not solely to fill a low wage labor pool. Business
strongly dislikes the idea that wages have been increasing because of a
labor shortage and this could be just the thing to meet that need. We
still need a strong, and yes centralized, entity which will advocate for
the children. As the union card says, "We teach the children, collectively
we decide, united we act".
Nate
----- Original Message -----
From: Eugene Matusov <ematusov who-is-at UDel.Edu>
To: XMCA <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 1999 5:55 PM
Subject: A call to radically rethink high school
>
> Hi everybody--
>
> Here is an interesting article about radical reform/elimination of high
> school:
> http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1999/05/18/p15s1.htm
>
> What do you think?
>
> Eugene
> ----------------------
> Eugene Matusov
> School of Education
> University of Delaware
> Newark, DE 19716
> Office (302) 831-1266
> Fax (302) 831-4445
> email ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
> Website http://ematusov.eds.udel.edu/
> -------------------------
>
>