Re: [xmca] Sumerian school pic

Hi MIke,
But, could schools, as an instrument of culture reproduction, have
been any different? It is inscribed in their founding stones that
their role that they are there to ensure the legitimization of the
social order. It was not you the one that opted for after school
setting design because schools are not the way to change society? And
what would be innovative cultural transmission? I can see in science
or in the arts a model of cultural innovation, but schools have never
been good at science or arts, anyway, however thousands of expert
hours invested in trying that they be!
David

On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Mike Cole wrote:

> Its important to note that ideology of schooling/virtue/intelligence/
> class
> that went with the first schools are ALSO
> still with us today.
>
> What school of education in the world studies schooling starting
> from the
> empirical fact that formal schooling since its
> origins (in the West at least, perhaps David K can fill us in on
> China,
> Korea, ....) have been modes of state domination,
> class exacerbation and exploitation and most crucially, that FAILURE
> IS A
> FUNDAMENTAL SYSTEMIC PROPERTY OF
> FORMAL SCHOOLING.... it is not a mistake, negligence, etc.
>
> The, and only then, can a disucssion of school "re-form" that
> includes state
> re-form and political economic re-form have
> a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. No school of ed i know of
> starts
> from this germ cell.
>
> mikd
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 3:35 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> Great stuff Andy, thanks for sharing. I used the attached picture
>> from my
>> Aunt Alice's Brooklyn elementary school classroom on the cover of The
>> Discourse of Character Education. From the early 1920s.
>>
>> Peter, when I worked as Teaching Space Coordinator at
>> Melbourne University, I collected the following set:
>> http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/tss/archive/history.html
>> from Sumeria to 1979, and for now:
>> http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/tss/archive/cls2.html
>> Andy
>> Peter Smagorinsky wrote:
>>> I first saw Mike use the Sumerian classroom slide a few years ago
>>> at a
>>> conference in Miami, and he has been kind enough to share it. I've
>>> used
>> it
>>> several times to make the point that Mike originally made: that the
>>> traditions of schooling run very deep. I used it at ISCAR, and the
>>> text
>> for
>>> the talk included the observation that while desks are no longer
>>> made of
>>> stone and rarely are bolted to the floor anymore, they still tend
>>> to sit
>> in
>>> the same formation as they did 6,000 years ago. The irony: In the
>>> USCD
>>> classroom in which I gave the talk, the seats were indeed bolted
>>> to the
>>> floor.
>>>
>>> To give a sense of just how old the Sumerian classroom is, I put
>>> together
>>> the following. It still boggles my mind:
>>>
>>> In his consideration of the developmental consequences of
>>> education, Cole
>>> (2005) takes a cross-cultural and historical perspective that
>>> leads him
>> back
>>> to the earliest classrooms of Indo-European civilization. Based on
>>> the
>>> arrangement of a Sumerian classroom from roughly 4,000 BCE, he
>>> surmises
>> that
>>> the last 6,000 years have seen great continuity in educational
>>> practice
>> in
>> a
>>> number of regards (see Figure 1.1; reprinted from Cole, 2005, p.
>>> 200). As
>>> the photograph reveals, students sat in rows-here, fixed in
>> stone-possibly
>>> chiseling notes in a proto-cuneiform script and undoubtedly facing
>>> the
>>> teacher. This template, in spite of other developments in teaching
>> practice,
>>> has served to guide instruction in most Western educational
>>> settings from
>>> (at least) the Uruk period of Sumerian civilization through the
>>> present.
>>> ________________________
>>> Place Figure 1.1 about here
>>> ________________________
>>> This classroom was built toward the end of the Stone Age, as the
>> Neolithic
>>> Period was about to give way to the Bronze Age. Students occupied
>>> its
>> seats
>>> 1,400 years before the legendary King Gilgamesh is believed to
>>> have ruled
>>> the land; 2,300 years before Hammurabi founded the city of Babylon
>>> and
>> wrote
>>> the first code of law; and 3,400 years before Nebuchadnezzar II is
>> believed
>>> to have built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It is as old as the
>>> idea of
>>> formal teaching and learning in the history of human social life.
>>>
>>> (this is from the first draft of a book chapter I'm developing, so
>>> please
>>> reference to this message if you borrow the phrasing)
>>>
>>> Sorry I forgot to attach this to message in response to Paul.
>>> The earliest known classroom in the "western" world.
>>> mike
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/
>> >+61 3 9380 9435
>> Skype andy.blunden
>> Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
>> http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm
>>
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David Preiss, Ph.D.
Subdirector de Extensión y Comunicaciones
Escuela de Psicología
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Av Vicuña Mackenna - 4860
7820436 Macul
Santiago, Chile

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Received on Thu Dec 11 09:32:55 2008