Nate's example is quite revealing. We would hope, after all, that a psychology of learning and teaching would be applicable to a psychology of learning to make omelettes. Historical artifacts, recipes, scripts, kitchens, each with their peculiar ensemble of pots, pans, bowls, stoves, and so on. Just like the artifacts of the school classroom, itself also an artifact. The emergence of cooking schools, cook books, and TV cook shows. Just like the emergence of normal schools, textbooks, and educational TV. The omellete itself, has its own history, perhaps invented here and there, and taken up as a cultural form, an innovation that spread throughout. And then with all one can do in the kitchen, the omellete is not without the eggs, no matter how much effort one puts in, (barring tofu from the discussion). Looking at the fine grain of the labour process, in particular, for food service, it is the egg, cheese, and depending on the kind of omellete, the peppers, onions, chives, herbs, and so on that raise my curiousity. Especially the egg, with its special form and composition that contributes uniquely to the omellete -- from a domesticated chicken no doubt, and the chicken in most cases is fed human-grown grain. The egg, we exchange. We can buy it at a store, we put a package around it and it becomes a product. We can make omelletes with it, and serve them in restaurants.
And those chickens bother me too. Nate, you have brilliantly and completely scrambled some thoughts. I'll never look at chickens and eggs the same way again.
When thinking of learning and teaching, I draw a line, practically and concretely, albeit somewhat arbitrarily. When I taught my children to make an omellette, they did not need to know the history of the omellete (I still don't know it), nor about their dialectical relation to nature (too abstract for them), nor the history of cooking, nor how the chicken birthed the egg, nor how the egg was distributed, and sold in a store. We took it as a given, and that seems to be one of the powerful aspects of culture, i.e. standing on the shoulders of giants, but also here, standing on the shoulders of store clerks, farmers, and I dare say, chickens.
An omellete can be made in minutes, and the actions and the product exist fleetingly most of the time. If a person were to think about creating a restaurant, that is successful (sustainable), however, (s)he may gain insight from learning many of the other aspects of commercial cooking, such as food distribution, demographics, the history of local restaurants, and so on. The actions of restauranteering would have a different impact across people, things, and time, than making an omellette.
In coming to this discussion, Andy and I, for example, are interested in different forms of activity. He, as an opponent of bourgeois society may have sweeping reforms in mind, and I, I am keeping my vision focussed around learning and teaching. So he and I, just by example again, are interested in different aspects of Leont'ev. It seems we must be careful in insisting the discussion must focus on X, when it is X, like the egg in making an omellette, that may be something that some of us can take as a given.
bb
>But isn't this sort of like saying the logic is in the egg when we make an
>omelette. Of course we can't make an omelette without an egg, but that does
>not really take us anywhere, does it? We have creative things like
>recipes - works better for some than others, and in this activity of making
>omelettes we no doubt need to utilize the eggs but it definately does not
>determine the omelette in any way. Now, if I go out to a nice breakfast and
>have a wonderful omelette - I would suspect the activity - recipes, cooking
>experience, training etc would tell me much more than the eggs. I am with
>Marx I guess omelettes arize from labor not eggs.
>
>I'm hungary now.
>
>Nate
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Phillip White [mailto:Phillip_White@ceo.cudenver.edu]
>Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 3:24 PM
>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>Subject: Re: RE: On Leontiev
>
>
>xmca@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
>>
>>
>Nate scrobe:
>>
>>Phillip, I am not familar with Edelmann - could you elaborate - he might
>>serve as an interesting contrast. It might also make the implications of
>>one
>>view or the other more explicit.
>
>i kind of fell off the ship - took me a while to clamber back on -
>
> okay - Edelman, Greald M. "Bright air, brilliant fire; On the matter
>of the mind. (1992) Basic Books.
>
> to be very fast, Edelman asserts that while many animals have primary
>consciousness, humans have higher concsiousness because of a recursive
>loop through the language center of the brain - to be very quick -
>through the brain stem, hypothalamus & autonomic systems we have value -
>along with the primary cortical areas (perception), through reentrant
>mapping of perceptual categorization & frontal, temporal, parietal
>cortices (conceptual categorization), looping on through Broca's and
>Wernicke's areas (semantics, syntax, phonology)
>
> through these physical structures of the brain, recursive neuronal paths,
>learning occurs through social exchange.
>
> so, it seems to me that we come to activity (labor/work etc.) with a
>simultaneously evolving physical brain structure. the two systems
>boot-strap one another.
>
> therefore, contrary to Marx, consciousness would not arise out of labour.
>
>
> and while there is the notion of the ideal floating out there, i wonder
>if we're not confusing "ideals" with a teleonomy?
>
>phillip
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> / \ / \ / \
> / \ / \
>
> Buddha speaking to Vasettha:
> One is not a brahmin by birth,
> Nor by birth a non-brahmin.
> By action is one a brahmin,
> by action is one a non-brahmin.
> So that is how the truly wise
> See action as it really is,
> Seers of dependent origination,
> Skilled in actions and its results.
> Action makes the world
>go round,
> Action makes this
>generation turn.
> Living beings are bound
>by action
> Like the chariot wheel
>by the pin.
>
>
>phillip white
>third grade teacher
>doctoral student
>scrambling a dissertation
>denver, colorado
>phillip_white@ceo.cudenver.edu
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