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RE: [xmca] Ways With Words



I'm reading, and pondering, David Ki's letters (which I really hope to see in book form some day) alongside Vygotsky's "The Teaching on the Emotions: Historical-Psychological Studies".
 
"The Teaching on the Emotions" is not what you think it is. First of all, it's not really about the emotions; it's about the teachings of Spinoza concerning the emotions as "passions" that enable or curtail actions of the body, and it's about how these teachings are--and are not--supported by the then fashionable theory of James and Lange and then recent discoveries about the adrenal glands and the vasomotor system that controls blood pressure. 
 
James and Lange agree: emotions are mediated responses. Who can disagree with that? Well, Vygotsky, actually. Because what mediates emotional responses to the environment, according to James and Lange, are "visceral changes" or "bodily sensations". These changes and sensations are more or less UN-mediated responses to external stimuli. In other words, stuff happens. Your body gets excited. You notice your body getting excited and you feel emotions as a result. 
 
How did such a cockamamie theory occur to TWO reasonably intelligent men (at more or less the same time) and why has it lasted so long? Well, James is a kind of introspectionist. Like his novelist brother, he just kind of expounds on the feeling of what happens, and his theory is more or less what you would expect from somebody who met a bear while camping in the Adirondacks and found himself running away before he had time to be frightend and is now contemplating the experience in the tranquility of his tent. 
 
Lange is a physiological imperialist. His theory is more or less what you would expect from a man who spends all his time studying changes in the vasomotor system (that is, the sympathetic nervous system which controls the dilation and contraction of your blood vessels). He has described this pretty well, and now he wants to use it to describe everything else and to become master of the universe.
 
Now, you might think that both the introspectionist and the imperialist might be interested in a historical, that is, an evolutionary account of what emotions are for: both might listen to someone who had a way of explaining how these feelings enable or inhibit the capacity of the body for activity. You might think that both might be interested in Cannon's discoveries about adrenalin, since this offers an actual chemical mechanism by which all this happens.
 
They are weirdly UN-interested, and it's precisely because it doesn't fit with their overall PHILOSOPHICAL paradigm because they have basically CARTESIAN take on things. There are feelings, and there are bodily sensations. 
 
One must cause the other. For centuries we believed that the former caused the latter. But we have been wrong--it's really the latter that cause the former. Get it? It's all about structure. History is bunk, and the means by which things happen is epiphenomenal.
 
So Vygotsky's study is historical in two senses. First of all, it's a defense of the HISTORICAL method of seeing how two radically dissimilar things get joined together in practice. Secondly it's historical in the sense that Marx means when he says that human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape; it's a working backwards from James-Lange to Spinozan monism rather than forwards from the origins of emotion in sensation to higher emotional responses.
 
I'm assuming that David Ki's three genres represent different moments in a historical process. That is, each teaching genre answers some problem that could not be answered without it, but creates new problems that can only be answered by a different teaching genre. 
 
Let me give you an example that has nothing to do with pronunciation, grammar, or even pragmatics. "Character" education, as it has been (mal)practiced in the USA, involves three basic approaches. There is the use of moral paragons and ethical commandments ("Live like Martin Luther King" "Just say NO!"). I take it that this is a form of habituation, in which the underlying skills are really more or less unconscious and simply acquired through emulation (practice). 
 
Then there is the use of concepts ("What would you do if...?"), in which the underlying concepts are made explicit through discussion, usually of moral dilemmas (think of Heinz and the druggist in all of those neo-Piagetian studies by Kohlberg and then imagine that Heinz, instead of stealing the cancer drug for his wife, chooses to push crack cocaine and buy the drug with the profits). I take it that this is a form of constructivism, in which knowledge is hammered together from operations.
 
And finally, you guessed it, there is a kind of enculturation model, which involves club activities of various kinds (e.g. "Smart Set" or Twelve-Step self help programmes, as well as Boy Scouts USA, Gay-Straight Alliance, etc.). I take it that this is a socio-cultural practice which aims at initiating kids into a disposition rather than acquiring a skill or constructing a concept.
 
I've deliberately chosen the same domain of knowledge, to make them comparable. But instead of choosing the "best genre" for a particular domain ("building character", or "fighting substance abuse") or throwing up my hands and saying that there is no best genre for teaching, juxtaposing them like this makes it appear--at least to me--that all of them are appropriate but that they belong to different developmental periods in the child's growth.
 
The skills genre is geared towards younger children, who can do so much more than they can think, while the concepts genre is designed for kids who think rather more than they can do, while the enculturation gere is for older kids who think and do in packs.
 
The problem is that this IS a developmental view: it DOES suggest that each genre addresses problems that the previous genre did not. And it also DOES suggest a paradigm that encompasses all of them: the growth and the development of the whole child, what LSV used to call "pedology". History is not exactly bunk, but it is one damned genre after another.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 
 



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