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Re: [xmca] Kindergarten Cram: When is play?
Associational chains, whether they occur to us naturally or are just a
mode of linking meanings that gets out of control as the text-scales
get longer, sure can take us on a Grand Tour! from no time for play
in early childhood schooling, to the excesses and illusions of
testing, to demanding essay tasks in (Confucian) testing vs.
deskilling ones in NCLB (the routinization of the 5-paragraph
"essay"), to how to think about writing and written language as higher-
order, developmentally late processes in relation to inner and outer
speech, materiality, contextualization, etc.
Whew!
I'm not sure how to organize my reactions, so I won't particularly
try. Here they are. Organize them yourself!
Convergent evolution in examinations. The same surface phenomena can
evolve historically as they can biologically in quite different
lineages for quite different reasons. Confucian examinations and
modern essay testing look a bit alike at some level of abstraction,
but I think that in terms of their historical specificity and
functions, they are really quite different. So I think David is
probably right that the Confucian meritocratic system does not have
much to do with modern school testing, though it may envelope the
latter in a certain cultural web of supportive feelings about
importance, honour, upward mobility, etc.
But what's so great, or hard about writing, anyway? that we should
consider it the most reliable index of knowledge and understanding, or
even of the habitus by which one succeeds in academia or elsewhere in
the wider "Knowledge Society"?
David adduces and modifies a bit, LSV's original arguments about
written language. I think LSV got a lot of this right, but not all of
it. Written language is really different from spoken, does require a
higher level (i.e. a successor level building on the first) of
"abstract" functioning -- though what "abstract" really means here, as
Mike points out in his questions, and David tries to explicate and
complicate, is problematic. LSV is trying in part to articulate
relationships among 3 modes of language: written, spoken, and 'inner
speech'. The kinds of "abstraction" that distinguish W from S, and S
from IS, however are not quite the same, and we can emphasize their
similarities or their differences. I think this leads to a large space
of possible and actual confusion.
What LSV is most wrong about, IMHO, is in accepting the universally
accepted view of his times that written language is a more highly
developed or more completely expressive (i.e. explicitizing) variety
than spoken. With tape recorders we have learned differently. Spoken
language, in situ, with interlocutors, is vastly more complex and
richer in meaning possibilities and actualities, than written
language. Written language is a specialized form, limited in what it
can say and do by the conventions it requires in order to overcome
everything that is normally missing from the full, natural
communication system of spoken language (which is not just language,
an artificial unit of analysis -- it is the unified system of speech,
gesture, posture, and many aspects of action generally).
Written language has been overvalued for many reasons, mostly
ideological. Its association with Sacred Texts, first and foremost
(Torah, Gospels, Quran, Vedas, Confucian classics, etc.). Later in the
European tradition with not just the Second Canon (Aristotle, etc.)
but with the Protestant emphasis on individual reading and
interpretation of the Bible (degenerating into fundamentalist
literalism, alas), and descending from that (as David Olson notes) a
close association between written text and hermeneutic reasoning,
which more or less becomes scientific reasoning eventually. Most of
the arguments that mastering written language grounds our higher
reasoning skills go wrong by not seeing that it is really the
juxtaposition of written vs. spoken language that leads to the
insights about language and reasoning that they attribute to written
mastery alone. (And inner speech probably plays some key role in all
that, too, as LSV seems to be struggling to to find a way to piece all
this together.)
So to come back to education and testing, the gold standard of
assessment of how well someone understands something is not how
beautiful an essay they can write about it, but how well they do in an
extended conversational oral examination in some concrete setting with
the relevant situation or stuff at hand.
JAY.
Jay Lemke
Professor
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
On May 8, 2009, at 11:50 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
dhk:
Yes. One fact I forgot to cite is that the closer the kids get to
the college entrance exam, the less impressive their performances
get on those international student evaluations that PISA and
Stevenson were so impressed by.
What's true of the kids is truer of their schools. We have the very
best elementary school on earth (in my humble opinion) and every
single elementary school teacher has liftime tenure, and is part of
a career structure that professors in the USA would envy (low
tuition in school, three months paid vacation a year, time off for
further education, etc.) Until the last few years, our elementary
schools were virtually test free.
Middle school teachers are treated much less well, and high school
teachers downright shabbily, and of course the testing system, for
all the excitement generated (airplanes grounded, traffic rerouted,
police and even troops mobilized to get the nation's kids to the
testing centres on time) at bottom enforces mediocrity, which is the
baseline of our disgraceful university system.
It's for PRECISELY this reason that I don't believe it has anything
to do with traditional Confucian testing. The Confucian tests were
based on essay writing, and required analysis and synthesis of
ancient texts and their creative interpretation and presentation.
The current exams are multiple choice, "skills-based" and
psychometric tests that Binet and Simon would easily recognize and
of which Thorndike would heartily approve. Items are statistically
independent (so much so that several attempts to factor-analyze the
test have turned up absolutely nothing)
This kind of statistical independence is exactly what Vygotsky
denies in Chapter Six, Section Four, (p. 267 of the Meccaci
translation, pp. 207-208 in Minick):
"The research has shown that the different materials of school
learning enter into reciprocal interactions during the course of the
development of the child. This development appears in a mode which
is more unified than that which we might suppose on the basis of the
experiments of Thorndike according to which development acquires an
atomistic character. The experiments of Thorndike have shown that
the development of any partial knowledge or capacity consists of the
formation of an independent chain of associations, which cannot in
any way aid the appearance of another associative chain. All
development would be independent, isolated and autonomous and would
be realized equally on the basis of associative links."
Instead, in the quotes I talked about last time, Vygotsky argues for
"abstraction" that is brought about through the realization of both
LINKS and DIVERGENCES between mathematical thinking (- x - = +) and
written speech ("It's NOT worth nothing"). I think Vygotsky uses the
word “abstract” in two linked but nevertheless distinguishable
senses, one having to do with capacity and the other having to do
with actual performance.
On the one hand, “abstract” refers to DECONTEXUALIZEABLE knowledge,
e.g. written language as opposed to spoken language. This is
abstract because it is IDEAL; when we write, we take away the
SENSUOUS, material form of words, we take away the SENSES we create
because we are talking to a real, immediate person, and we take away
the SENSIBLE purposes of language use because there is no question
to which we are replying, no command which we obey, no request we
must respond to, etc.
On the other, “abstract” refers to RECONTEXTUALIZEABLE knowledge,
e.g. actual writing as opposed to actual speech. This is abstract
because it is VOLITIONAL, it does not depend on response to an
immediate environment. But it DOES depend on choice, selection, and
free will constrained by the writer’s purposes. When we actually
write we choose particular sequences of letters to form words, and
it is possible to think of idiosyncratic spellings like “doe a dear”
which give us access to our volitional memory and focus our
volitional attention.
When we actually write we select sequences of words to form
sentences; at the level of grammar innovation becomes not simply an
option but a virtual necessity, because unlike spelling there is no
ready reserve of preset sentences which will tell us exactly what to
say in every situation. Finally, when we actually write we are free
to create our own EXCHANGES and not simply our own sentences,
creating the need for language use as well as fulfilling it; If at
the level of lexicogrammar, written language tends “znachenie”, at
the level of the text, it tends towads “smysl”.
The distinction seems important to me, because Bakhtin (and even
Volosinov) does not really recognize that the latter form of
abstract thinking, which allows the individual to realize free
choice, rests on the former, which makes thinking available in a new
context precisely by tearing it from an old one. It seems to me,
though, that this kind of abstraction is actually what we see in the
old kind of Confucian testing.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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