Re: [xmca] The True Origins of Scaffolding

[Jonna Kangasoja <jonna.kangasoja@helsinki.fi>]

Thank you again David, for sharing!

best, Jonna

David Kellogg kirjoitti 10.4.2009 kello 12.12:

> I guess we all know that, contrary to Peter Langford's claims,  
> Vygotsky did not "invent" scaffolding, or even use the term except  
> to refer to building construction (Vol. 4, p. 205).
>
> But last night I think I found the TRUE origins of the term. No,  
> it's not Bruner, Woods, and Ross. It goes back MUCH further.
>
> Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth century post-modern novel written  
> by Laurence Sterne, is in many ways a polemic against the early  
> forays into empiricist psychology by John Locke and David Hume. But  
> he's particularly harsh on their educational writings.
>
> The eponymous Tristram's father is writing the "Tristrapaedia", a  
> compendium of very elaborate instructions for his five year old  
> son's future tutors, including elaborate tables of auxiliary verbs  
> that look rather like "scaffolding" techniques I've seen employed  
> today.
>
> Walter Shandy is so busy writing this that the child's entire  
> preschool education passes him by. The poor child is left with an  
> illiterate servant as guardian, and one day, while Susanna has  
> neglected to empty the chamber pot and is holding the boy up to  
> urinate out the window, the sash cords on the window give way, and  
> Sterne never quite tells us whether the boy is castrated or merely  
> circumcised.
>
>      "Everything in this world, said my father, is big with jest-- 
> and has wit in it, and instruction too--if we can but find it out.  
> Here is the scaffold work of INSTRUCTION, its true point of folly,  
> without the BUILDING behind it.
>      "--Here is the glass for pedagogues, preceptors, tutors,  
> governours, gerund-grinders, and bear leaders (i.e. the tutor- 
> chaperones who accompany young gentlemen on their 'Grand Tour'--DK)  
> to view themselves in their true dimensions....
>      "Oh, there is a husk and shell, Yorick, which grows up with  
> learning, which their unskillfulness knows not how to fling away!--
>      "--SCIENCES MAY BE LEARNED BY ROTE BUT WISDOM NOT."
> (Norton Critical Edition, p. 276)
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
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