well, my intention was not to toss out a pink sardine! (joke) i was
attempting to frame a question so that the child who suffers from the
consequences of adult actions might not have to suffer so.
>One is almost
>forced to assume that each of the stake holders who determine the outcome
>(continued retention) believe they have the best interests of the children
>in mind, either directly or indirectly, that is they are all looking to
>best support the child as a member of some community or other of their own
>definitions (the moral community, the hard working community, the thousand
>flowers a'bloomin' community, etc.)
Jim Wertsch in "Mind as action" notes (page 24) "The task of a
sociocultural approach is to explicate the relationships between human
_action_, on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional, and historical
contexts in which this action occurs, on the other hand." As he earlier
noted on page four, "One needs only to encounter a professional
organization or interdepartmental politics at a university to be reminded
of the degree to which specialization and isolation are basic facts of
modern institutional life." Schools are large bureaucratic organizations
which value their own particular mission, and often that mission is not
about meeting the needs of the children but rather meeting the needs of
the employees of that organization. and, to further refer to Wertsch -
pg. 5 - "... contemporary social issues inevitably involve psychological
and cultural and institutional and other dimensions." so, the question
about retention isn't so simple - just the psychological responses are
enough to turn the question into a battle-ground of conflicting
ideological beliefs about how to treat children.
> And of course this is all placed into
>the broader frameworks of societal priorities each voice so conceives:
>e.g., what good is the realized potential of a Van Gogh if what we really
>need is people who know how to make better smart bombs?
>
>I think any way of framing it to take the best support of the child would
>have to ask: best support in whose local knowledge? How do you propose to
>escape this inevitable relativism of political discourse?
i agree, and i think it is best done with in the smallest unit of
activity in which retention might occur - first the classroom, then the
school, then the school district, etc.
> Of course
>authorial voices have been disallowed from the get-go, no?
well, i'm not sure by what you mean by an 'authorial voice' -
phillip