I just got a 1932 English translation of Chukovsky¡¯s Crocodile on E-bay. It¡¯s quite delightful (it has the charming original Russian illustrations, and the translation is full of in-line rhymes and witty allusions) but I really DO see why LSV hated it.
Fichtner is absolutely correct to stress the INAPPROPRIACY of applying educational concepts designed for the revolutionary reconstruction of Soviet society to the preservation of capitalist rule (in particular, there is a fundamental contradiction in using methods that aim at REPLACING other-regulation with self-regulation to prepare children for a life of¡¦well, other-regulation, really). Of course, the reverse is just as true: the educational concepts designed for the preservation of capitalist rule are inappropriate to the revolutionary reconstruction of Soviet society.
On the other hand, Fichtner may be underestimating the degree to which Soviet education had to impart basic knowledge, practical skills and a modern, scientific frame of mind to people who were in many ways not very receptive to any of the above. It¡¯s a thankless, Sisyphean task that even those who would teach Homer to carpenters must put their shoulders to, whether they work in Russia, in Prussia, or in the present day USA.
Chukovsky¡¯s cute little book serves NEITHER purpose very well. It doesn¡¯t teach much about learning to learn OR about literacy, because the language play, fabulous and tintinnabulous, is really quite beyond the power of children to imitate or even comprehend. In that sense it¡¯s a good example of so-called children¡¯s literature that is literature but not really children¡¯s. No wonder Vygotsky and Krupskaya were annoyed.
Warning to the drivel sensitive...here are some rather long notes on the Fichtner article and a somewhat far-fetched attempt to tie it to Wolff-Michael's last ruminations on the collective and the individual and some Ribot I've been reading (warning to the drivel sensitive):
a) Fichtner says that there is no need to interpret the word ¡°revolutionary¡± in a political sense; we may imagine that any time we have one part of the self raising the self as a whole by the intellectual/emotional bootstraps we have something revolutionary (p. 4).
But Fichtner gives us three instructive (if you will pardon the pun) examples of ¡°learning to learn¡± experiments which see too far beyond the social needs that give rise to them and are ultimately demolished by the very societies they set out to serve: Humboldt¡¯s Prussia, Stalin¡¯s USSR, and of course the present day USA. Fichtner says that in each case the approaches were NOT defeated by their own ambitions but rather deliberately and materially crushed by hostile class interests. Well said!
But then it¡¯s a little hard to see why it¡¯s not necessary to interpret the word ¡°revolutionary¡± in a political, and not in a simply psychological, sense. And doesn¡¯t the use of the word ¡°revolutionary¡± to describe the creative reconstruction of the relations between psychological functions WITHIN an individual obscure the necessary precondition, which is the destructive overthrow of social functions divided BETWEEN classes in society?
b) Wolff-Michael says that any individual act is simply the realization of a potential that exists within a collectivity. This means that even acts of creativity (even acts of revolution!) are the realization of a potential that exists within the collective already. It¡¯s not clear what the word ¡°potential¡± means here: if it simply means that individuals in the collective are capable of them, then this is rather tautological.
But if it means more than that (if it means that whole collectives, and not simply individuals or sub-collectives within them, are capable of creative/revolutionary acts), it¡¯s a little hard to see in what sense creative acts are creative and revolutionary acts are revolutionary; it appears that they are not bringing into being anything new at all, but merely realizing potentials that were there all the long, the same as non-creative acts and the same as non-revolutionary ones. What if revolutionary or creative potential is contingent on individual acts? What if revolutionary/creative change in the collective is realizing a potential that was there in the thinking of individual(s) rather than the other way around?
c) Ribot says: ¡°La volonte/ n¡¯a pas de mouvement propres en patrimoine: il faut qu¡¯elle coordonne et associe, puisqu¡¯elle dissocie pour former des associations nouvelles. Elle re`gne par droit de conque^te, non par droit de naissance. -–De me^me, l¡¯imagination cre/atrice ne surgit pas tout arme/e. Ses mate/riaux sont les images qui sont ici les e/quivalents des mouvements musculaires; elle traverse une pe/riode d¡¯essai; elle est toujours, au de/but (pour des raisons que nous indiquerons plus tard), une imitation; elle n¡¯attient que progressivement ses formes complexes.¡± Ribot, Th. (1908) Essai sur l¡¯imagination créatrice. Paris: Félix Alcan, pp. 6-7.
(Will does not have in its patrimony its own sensorimotor movements. It must coordinate and associate other movements, for it disassociates in order to form new associations. Will rules by right of conquest, not by right of birth. In the same way, the creative imagination does not emerge in full armor. Its materials are images which are, here, the equivalent of muscular movements; it must go through a period of trial and error; it is always, in the beginning (for reasons we will explain later) an imitation: it only gradually achieves its complex forms.)
The classical allusion to the goddess of wisdom emerging fully-armed from Zeus¡¯ fractured skull would have captivated Humboldt, who believed that every carpenter should learn Greek! But being captivated is really not the same thing as being convinced, and the idea that all creativity begins with imitation is, to any one who has suffered a freshman year in art school, not very convincing.
For an art school freshman, will is, at least at first, quite imperfect in its coordinations and associations, especially in associating a perception with a memory (remembering what people look like for example) and in coordinating a perception with a motor action (attempting to draw their portrait from memory). In attempting to copy exactly, the best perception and motor control can achieve is an imperfect imitation. Let us, in a Hegelian vein, call this variation-in-itself.
In an OBJECTIVE sense, therefore, variation is easier to achieve than exact imitation; it is always easier to vary an action (even your own action) than to repeat it precisely. When this kind of initially involuntary variation itself becomes will-governed (SUBJECTIVE variation, or variation-for-oneself instead of just variation-for-others), we may say that imitation has become creative, and when we all contemplate the product as something new, we say that creativity has taken place.
If this is so, then it is not really true to say that imitation precedes creativity: imperfect imitation (and all imitation is involuntarily imperfect from the outset) provides the OBJECTIVE basis for creativity and deliberately ¡°imperfect¡± imitation supplies its SUBJECTIVE basis. Creativity, therefore, is indeed implicit in the idea of imitation from the very beginning, just as Vygotsky taught!
BUT (to return to points a and b above):
a) Let us call this creativity, but not revolution. For it to be revolution, there must be real, concrete, social destruction first. (There is no need to destroy the Department of Education; Ronald Reagan did that already. The Department of Defense or the Department of Justice would be a much more obvious place to start, particularly since both have apparently usurped the place of university for many who don¡¯t want to enter working life with massive student debt.)
b) Let us say that collective institutions (even the school, the army, the prison) provide the ENVIRONMENT for creativity (and even for revolution) rather than say that they provide the potential. Let us then say that individuals provide the actual creativity and revolutionary organizations provide the actual revolutions (with leadership and with luck).
c) This is in a way similar to Halliday¡¯s otherwise puzzling formulation, namely that sociocultural development provides the ENVIRONMENT for ontogentic development, but ontogenetic development provides the RAW MATERIAL for the next stage (the future stages) of sociocultural development. But let us recognize that using this formulation RULES OUT:
i) skepticism about causality in the relationship between sociocultural development and individual behavior (even in the rather weak form that Geertz endorses, namely that it is better to talk about culture being the context that makes individual behavior meaningful). Schools, prisons, and armies cause individual behavior in obvious ways; the causality of individual creativity is not so obvious but this does not mean it is uncaused and uncausable.
ii) glib formulae to the effect that creativity and collectivity are mutually constitutive, or that one is constructed by and constructs the other. The relationship between PAST sociocultural evolution and FUTURE child development is poorly served by the terms ¡°symmetrical¡±, ¡°mutual¡±, or ¡°simultaneously ¡¦ed and ¡¦ing¡± for the same reason that a conversation is poorly described as two people both talking and listening at the same time rathr than taking turns talking and listening.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
---------------------------------
Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos & more.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Mon Jul 30 20:31 PDT 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Oct 08 2007 - 06:02:19 PDT