Good points, Jon.
I wonder, Andy, if you are looking more at children who take on adult
rolls due to traumatic/ unplanned change in their sociocultural
conditions/ in the necessity of the activit(ies) they must perform...
~em
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Jonathan Tudge JRTUDGE
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 7:46 AM
To: ablunden@mira.net; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Adult before their time?
Greetings, chaps!
Don't we need to distinguish between children who have been recruited as
child soldiers or who currently live in war zones and others who are
viewed as "adult before their time"? Just because many of us have become
accustomed to a lengthy adolescence and an adulthood that may not start
until the 20s, it was typical until the last couple of hundred years in
most places for adulthood to start far earlier. Even after passage of
the
Factory Acts in England at the start of the 19th century 10-year-olds
were
still working up to 12 hours a day. In rural parts of Africa, at least
until the advent of universal (or at least widespread) primary education
girls as young as five were routinely expected to care for their younger
siblings, and there was no expectation that engaging in productive
labour
would only start at age 10.
Jon
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Tudge
Professor
155 Stone
Mailing address:
248 Stone Building
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
PO Box 26170
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
USA
phone (336) 256-0131
fax (336) 334-5076
http://www.uncg.edu/hdf/facultystaff/Tudge/Tudge.html
Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
10/23/2009 05:30 AM
Please respond to
ablunden@mira.net; Please respond to
"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
To
"eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
cc
Subject
Re: [xmca] Adult before their time?
I think the answer to my question may be found in the
combination of a paper which Emily sent me: "What Children
Can Tell Us About Living in Danger" (by James Garbarino,
Kathieen Kostelny, and Nancy Dubrow Erikson Institute for
Advanced Study in Child Development, Chicago), and
Vygotsky's chapter on "Development of Thinking and Formation
of Concepts in the Adolescent" in Volume 5 of the LSV CW.
Garbarino & Co. look at a number of zones of conflict, such
as the Gaza Strip, and among other things observe that
"fanatical" ideology is a vital support for people,
especially children, who are faced with enormous moral and
emotional pressures. Not hard to see why.
Vygotsky mentions first of all in his explanation of how
adolescents acquire concepts as part of a completely new
type of thinking characteristic of the "transitional
period," the entry into and an interest in ideology.
Ideology has the same psychological structure as "science"
(cf Davydov's paper on "scientific concepts") especially the
abstract sciences like maths and physics. He also says that
the child who has just arrived at concepts cannot acquire
dialectical thought. This means that adolescents first
acquire conceptual thought in the form of relatively rigid
systems of meaning, a.k.a., "fanatical" ideology.
This rings true to me. The child forced to grow up before
their time who have to make sense of the wider world of
societal life, politics and war, acquires fanatical, or at
least, overly rigid or simplified *ideology*. What greater
ideologist is there than the young Red Guard?
Does this ring true or false to people who have more
experience than I do in this business?
Andy
Duvall, Emily wrote:
Beah's story is amazing... there was a very good interview with him
that
is well worth digging for and listening to/viewing.
If you search, child soldier, on amazon you will find a plethora of
offerings.
I would also suggest a few others...
Iqbal by F. D'Adamo about the rug making industry in Pakistan (Iqbal
was
assassinated for his work in fighting child labor after he escaped and
became an international icon in the war)... there are other
biographies
on his life
The Circuit, by F. Jimenez may be a bit out of the realm... child of
an
illegal immigrant... it is autobiographical, by the way.
Peter Sis' book, The Wall, is an interesting memoir/ graphic novel on
growing up behind the Iron Curtain as a child... being encouraged to
report on loved ones, etc makes for an interesting view of soldiering.
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang is another
interesting perspective on children coming from war
Another direction that could be interesting are Viet Nam and other vet
memoirs... my husband went over as a teenager and his experiences in
recon totally changed him... in other words, the PTSD... I suspect
that
this is the underlying, common effect that you will find in many
stories
involving children war, being stolen/sold, abandoned, etc.
Some texts, such as Hiroshima, No Pika by T. Maruki, biographical
narrative, don't really get at the child's experience with a child's
voice, but are powerful nonetheless.
I also have on my 'to be read' shelf:
Shattered: Stories of Children and War, by J. Armstrong
Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust A. Zullo
Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries by Z Filipovic
Best,
Em
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of David Preiss
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 11:15 AM
To: lchcmike@gmail.com; eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] Adult before their time?
Dear Andy,
As regards child soldiers, this recent book is a good reference: A
Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
It is testimonial.
Best,
David
On Oct 22, 2009, at 11:33 AM, mike cole wrote:
Andy --
Two quick points:
1. The consequences are for development of the whole child in
society so
focusing on the cognitive seems especially counterproductive in the
cases of
interest to you and xmca. And may, indeed, provide a privileged site
for
inquiry. But its very dangerous. A colleague of a friend of mine
doing such
research was shot and killed in Rio a few days ago.
2. Good Brazilian street children or child soldiers or several
cognate
categories and you should be inundated. I was.
mike
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 6:19 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
wrote:
Mmm that looks interesting in itself, about the modern fad among
middle
class parents for pushing their children to overperform
academically. But I
suspect I am not going to get an answer to what's intriguing me
that way.
When a child is suddenly deprived of their support systems -
becoming a
street urchin or a child soldier for example or having to look
after their
siblings if the parents become dysfunctional - then they are thrown
into a
social situation which we talked of before, in which it is possible
to learn
concepts, the very opposite of course of the "scientific concepts"
inculcated at school. I was wondering if the result is a very
stunted kind
of thinking (like the policeman who knows how to spot a criminal by
age,
race, and so on) or precocious wisdom which understands that words
express
social meanings, not just what they appear to mean on the surface,
and
watches the lay of the land.
But what is that precocious worldliness in cognitive terms?
Andy
mike cole wrote:
Early claims:
David Elkind, The hurried child. Cambridge. DeCapo Press. 1981
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 3:25 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
wrote:
Not quite the same sort of trauma, but there's plenty of pop
analysis on
the life of Michael Jackson these days. p
Peter Smagorinsky
Professor of English Education
Department of Language and Literacy Education
The University of Georgia
125 Aderhold Hall
Athens, GA 30602
smago@uga.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
[mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
]
On
Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 4:19 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [xmca] Adult before their time?
Can anyone tell me of any research done on the idea of
children who have "grown up before their time," as a result
of war, family disaster or otherwise having been projected
into the adult world on their own? And how is such a
characterization "adult before their time" made? On the
basis of the use of concepts?? Lack of interest in play??
Andy
Tony Whitson wrote:
I would add Nietzsche, along with Heidegger and Derrida, to what
Michael
says.
Heidegger is sometimes dismissed as incomprehensible, but
Nietzsche and
Derrida are more often treated as wild and reckless writers who
can be
fun to read, but without looking for any careful argument.
If you don't expect either of them to be writing seriously, you
won't
read them seriously and you won't see what they're writing. N
said as
much, but then if you're not taking him seriously, you won't
take him
seriously when he says that, either.
I saw an interview with D once where the interviewer, in the
interview,
in D's presence, ventured that deconstruction was basically the
same as
the US sitcom "Seinfeld"--It's just a matter of taking everything
ironically. D replied that if you want to know anything about
deconstruction, you need to do some reading. The interview was
pretty
much over at that point.
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
I don't know what people read that Heidegger has written. I
personally
have not met a person who has read Sein und Zeit to the end,
people
appear to read secondary literature rather than the primary.
Moreover,
nobody appears to be talking/writing about Unterwegs zur Sprache
(David K., this should be of interest to you), or about
Holzwege and
other works. First, I can't see anything that would fit the
political
ideas of Nazism, for one, and I can't see anything that would be
understandable in terms of the quote that Steve contributes
below.
I do understand that Heidegger is difficult to read---I had to
take
repeated stabs since I first purchased Sein und Zeit in 1977.
Heidegger, by the way, does very close readings of some ancient
Greek
philosophers. And when you pay attention to his writing, and do
the
same with Derrida, for example, then you begin to realize that
the
latter has learned a lot from the former.
Now that my English is better than my German ever has been
(although
it was my main language for 25 years) I personally know about
the
problems of translations. Above all, any of the mechanical
translations that have been proposed on this list won't do even
the
simplest of texts. And it is about more than literal content.
We can learn from both of them, Heidegger and Derrida, that
things are
more difficult than they look, and even more difficult than
reading
their texts.
Michael
On 21-Oct-09, at 7:37 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:
I appreciate Martin's insights on Heidegger, as I do those of
others.
I for one don't really know that much about Heidegger's ideas.
I am
glad to learn from those that have studied him.
Here is an interesting glossary entry on Heidegger in a book of
Marxist essays by George Novack (1905-1992), Polemics in Marxist
Philosophy: Essays on Sartre, Plekhanov, Lukacs, Engels,
Kolalkowski,
Trotsky, Timpanaro, Colletti (1978). The glossary to the book
was
written by Leslie Evans and edited by Novack.
"Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976) - German existentialist
philosopher.
His ideas were best expounded in Sein un Zeit (Being and Time,
1927).
A philosopher of irrationalism. Heidegger maintained that the
chief
impediment to human self-development was reason and science,
which led
to a view of the world based on subject-object relations.
Humans were
reduced to the status of entities in the thing-world which they
were
thrown (the condition of "thrownness"). This state of
inauthentic
being could be overcome neither through theory (science) nor
social
practice, but only by an inward-turning orientation toward
one's self,
particularly in the contemplation of death. Heidegger was
influenced
by Kierkegaard and Husserl (see entries), and in turn deeply
affected
the thought of Sartre, Camus, and Marcuse. He was himself a
chair of
philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928 after his
mentor,
Edmund Husserl, had been forced to relinquish it by the Nazis.
Heidegger supported Hitler, which led to his disgrace at the
end of
World War II and his retirement in 1951 to a life of rural
seclusion." (pg 307-308)
- Steve
On Oct 21, 2009, at 5:04 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
I think Martin is completely right in the proposition that
(taking
account of the continuing fascination the academy has with
Heidegger)
his works should be read to understand why and how Fascism and
Heidegger's philosophy supported each other and what should be
done
about it.
As Goethe said "The greatest discoveries are made not by
individuals
but by their age," or more particularly every age is bequeated
a
certain problematic by their predecessors, but the different
philosophers confront that problematic in different ways. To
say that
those on either side of the battle lines in the struggle of a
particular times have something in common, seems to be in
danger of
missing the point.
Also, in my opinion, Husserl and Heidegger may have been
responding
to Hegel, but between them they erected the gretest barrier to
understanding Hegel until Kojeve arrived on the scene. But
that's
just me. A grumpy old hegelian.
Andy
Martin Packer wrote:
A few days ago Steve made passing reference to an article that
apparently Tony had drawn his attention to, titled "Heil
Heidegger."
I Googled and found that it is a recent article in the
Chronicle of
Higher Education.
<http://www.chroniclecareers.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/
48806/>
The focus of the article is Heidegger's links with and
support of
the Nazis, and its principal recommendations are that we
should stop
paying attention to Heidegger, stop translating and
publishing his
writing, and "mock him to the hilt."
I feel I should comment on this, since I have occasionally
drawn on
Heidegger's work in these discussions. I certainly have no
intention
of apologizing for Heidegger, who seems to have been a very
nasty
person, who was responsible for some deplorable actions. I do
want
to question, however, the proposal that because of these
facts we
all would be better off ignoring his writing.
I was introduced to Heidegger by a Jewish professor of
philosophy
who shared his last name (coincidentally as far as I know)
with one
of the best-known victims of antisemitism. At that time less
was
known about Heidegger's Narzism, but by no means nothing, and
I
recall discussion in the classroom of the issue. I came to
feel that
the last thing one should try to do is separate the man's
work from
his life. Perhaps if he had been working on some obscure area
of
symbolic logic, say, that would have been possible, but
Heidegger
had written a philosophy of human existence, and this would
seem to
*demand* that there be consistency between what he wrote and
how he
lived. Indeed, perhaps it would be important to study the
man's
writings to try to understand where he went wrong; at what
point in
his analysis of human being did Heidegger open the door to the
possibility of fascism? I think in fact that it is in
Division II of
Being and Time, where Heidegger is describing what he called
'authentic Dasein,' which amounts to a way that a person
relates to
time, specifically to the certainty of their own death, that
the
mistake is made and the door is opened to evil.
Carlin Romano, the author of the article, doesn't seem to know
Heidegger's work very well. Dasein ("being there," i.e. being-
in-
the-world) is not a "cultural world," nor do "Daseins
intersect," as
he puts it. (But I suppose that he is mocking Heidegger.) And
that
brings me to my other reason for recommending that we
continue to
read Heidegger, his politics and (lack of) ethics
notwithstanding.
It is that his analysis throws light on issues that have been
raised
in this group, and were important to LSV and others. I am
sure it
seems odd to link a Nazi philosopher to a socialist
psychologist,
but I am hardly the first to see connections. Lucien Goldmann
wrote
"Lukacs and Heidegger," a book in which he acknowledged the
incongruity but argued that there are "fundamental bonds"
between
the two men's work, that at the beginning of the 20th century
"on
the basis of a new problematic first represented by Lukacs,
and then
later on by Heidegger, the contemporary situation was slowly
created. I would add that this perspective will also enable
us to
display a whole range of elements common to both
philosophers, which
are not very visible at first sight, but which nevertheless
constitute the common basis on which undeniable antagonisms
are
elaborated" (p. 1).
What is this common basis? It is that of overcoming the
separation
between subject and object in traditional thought, overcoming
subject/object dualism, by recognizing the role of history in
individual and collective human life, and rethinking the
relation
between theory and practice. As Michael wrote, Heidegger
reexamined
the traditional philosophical distinction between an object (a
being) and what it *is* (its Being), and rejected both
idealism and
essentialism to argue that what an object is (and not just
what it
'means') is defined by the human social practices in which it
is
involved, and in which people encounter it. These practices,
of
course, change over historical time, so the conditions for an
object
to 'be' are practical, social, and historical. And since
people
define themselves in terms of the objects they work with, the
basis
of human being is practical, social, and historical too.
I continue to believe that this new kind of ontological
analysis,
visible according to Goldmann in the work of both Lukacs and
Heidegger, influenced in both cases by Hegel, is centrally
important. If we can learn from studying Heidegger how to
acknowledge these cultural conditions without falling into a
valorization of the folk, without dissolving individuals in
the
collective (a failing of the Left just as much as the Right),
then
we will have gained, not lost, by reading his texts.
Martin
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