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Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17

*How about 14?*
*........From today's NY Times.*
Robert Lake

------------------------------
May 23, 2011
Forever Young? In Some Ways, YesBy DAVID HAJDU

BREAK out the guitar-shaped cake pans.

Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and
magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves
the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major
pop-music artists born around the same time.

John Lennon would have turned 70 last October; Joan Baez had her 70th
birthday in January; Paul Simon and George Clinton will reach 70 before the
end of this year. Next year, the club of legendary pop septuagenarians will
grow to include Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson
and Lou Reed. Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia would have also been 70 in 2012.

Perhaps this wave of 70th birthdays is mere coincidence. There are, after
all, lots of notable people of all ages. But I suspect that the explanation
for this striking cluster of musical talent lies in a critical fact of
biography: all those artists turned 14 around 1955 and 1956, when rock ’n’
roll was first erupting. Those 14th birthdays were the truly historic ones.

Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social
contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the
tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult
you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in
your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.

“Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,”
says Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and the director of the
Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill
University. “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing,
including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our
cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical
tastes become a badge of identity.”

Biography seems to bear this out. When Robert Zimmerman (the future Bob
Dylan) turned 14 as a freshman at Hibbing High School in Minnesota, Elvis
Presley was releasing his early records, including “Mystery Train,” and Mr.
Dylan discovered a way to channel his gestating creativity and ambition.
“When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work
for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Mr. Dylan once said.
“Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”

Mr. McCartney, the son of a big-band musician, abandoned his first
instrument, the trumpet, after hearing Presley. “It was Elvis who really got
me hooked on beat music,” Mr. McCartney has been quoted as saying. “When I
heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ ” — which was released in 1956, when Mr. McCartney
turned 14 — “I thought, this is it.”

The timeline of music history is dotted with such moments. A hundred years
ago, the model for 20th-century music took form with Irving Berlin’s popular
appropriation of the black music of the day, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The
song sold more than a million copies on the platform of its time, sheet
music. The year was 1911, when three future innovators of vernacular,
cross-racial music — Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Rodgers and Fletcher Henderson —
all turned 14.

In 1929, when the singer Rudy Vallee mastered and exploited the emerging
electronic technologies of the microphone and the national radio broadcast
to become a progenitor of an intimate, naturalistic style of singing derided
by adults as “crooning,” both Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra turned 14.

When the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the
14-year-olds (or soon to be) who were around to experience pop music’s new
superstars included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Gene Simmons and Billy
Joel.

I can’t help wondering what a 14-year-old with Mr. Dylan’s gifts and hungers
would have done if he had been born three or four years earlier and had hit
his teens when pop music was in its pre-rock lull, anesthetized by the
over-sugared tunes of Teresa Brewer and Vic Damone. Back then, the drive-ins
raged with cool pulp-movie delinquents, like Marlon Brando in “The Wild
One.” Would Mr. Dylan, a movie nut in childhood, have gone into screen
acting to channel his rebellious spirit?

Every age makes its own kind of genius. For hints of what the cultural
giants of the future will be doing in their own time, we’d be well served to
look in the ninth-grade lockers of today. Perhaps one day we’ll witness the
transmutation of social networking into an as-yet-unimaginable kind of art —
140-character sonnets or mash-ups of media we haven’t heard or seen yet.
Whatever we’ll be celebrating as the legacy of the 70-year-olds of 2067, it
will surely belong to the 14-year-olds of 2011.

David Hajdu, an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University, is
the author of “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez,
Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.”


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:59 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> In the passage to which David Kel kindly drew my attention, Vygotsky
> basically says that he has not yet figured out the nature of the Crisis at
> 17, or more precisely really, the crisis which marks the End of the
> "transitional period" and the passage to adulthood. But reading on, I think
> he is being too modest.
>
> We all know from T&S that thinking in concepts is not attained until
> adolescence. Well, the first half of Volume 5 of the LSV CW has a collection
> of articles on the development of the Mental Functions in adolescence which
> make his point much clearer. It is not just that thinking in concepts does
> not arrive until adolescence, but **thinking in concepts is the leading
> neoformation of adolesence**. That is, conceptual thinking reorganises and
> restructures the emotions, attention, self-consciousness, will - everything.
> The psyche of the youth becomes a concrete concept.
>
> At the conclusion of the chapter on "Development of the Higher Mental
> Functions during the Transitional Age," Vygotsky caps it all off with a
> 3-page discourse on Hegel's /Science of Logic/ as a metaphor for the
> development of the human personality. He does this of course, not directly,
> but by means of quotations recycled from Deborin, Lenin and Engels, all of
> which highlights those passages of Hegel where Hegel talks of the
> personality as a concept, and the arrival of adulthood and entry into social
> life as corresponding to the Concept (the 3rd book of the Logic). Pity
> Vygotsky died so young.
>
> All the writers, including those whose work xmca has just been discussing
> under the heading of moral development, seem to agree that the crisis which
> marks the end of adolesence is the very act of taking up a place in adult
> society, choosing a vocation, or as I would say, adopting a project(s).
>
> In the excellent and very helpful chapter of Mike Cole's book on Child
> Development, chapter 16, which deals with this period, we find descriptions
> of the struggle of the youth to establish an identity. This happens,
> according to Vygotsky, simultaneously with them forming a concept of the
> world, shaped and instantiated by their activity as part of some social
> class. In just one passage, Mike refers to this as "self-concept." Usually,
> in this period of individualism, we call it "identity," but self-concept is
> a far superior conception of oneself-in-the-world, I believe.
>
> So it seems to me that the crowning concept of Vygotsky's theory
> development of the human being is the development of the person as a
> concept, aka and identity or self-concept, inseparably from an ideological
> view of the world instantiated by participation in a project, be that a
> profession, a family or a political or religious movement (including
> divergent selves in different domains, different projects). It is the way
> this enormous step, from childhood dependency to active responsibility for
> procreation both biological and phylogenetic, which hangs like the Sword of
> Damocles over the youth, at just a time when their entire physiology,
> interests and psyche is being totally disorganised by the arrival of
> sexuality. These are the facts that make adolesence such a stormy and
> troublesome time.
>
> Any thoughts?
> Andy
>
> ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:
>
>> With regard to its form, the logical has three sides: (a) the side of
>> abstraction or of the understanding, (ß) the dialectical or negatively
>> rational side, [and] (?) the speculative or positively rational one. (EL §
>> 79)
>>
>> I pulled this off of this website:
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/seminars/paulhegel.htm
>>
>> I dare say that this is the 17 year old's crisis and consequently becomes
>> an individual's synthesis of life, meaning and all that.  As Bob Dylan
>> wrote, "I was so much older than, I'm younger than that now."  At 17 a
>> person has been provided the world's potential without any consequences (for
>> the most part, of course there are exceptions) and has yet to embark upon
>> their practical life.  Consider the soldier as poet, the scientist as
>> mechanic, the engineer as lumberjack and perhaps this is a bit of insight
>> into the 17 year old's crisis.
>>
>> comparing apples to oranges?
>>
>> eric
>>
>>
>>
>> From:        Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>> To:        David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
>> Cc:        Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date:        05/19/2011 01:10 AM
>> Subject:        Re: [xmca] crisis at age 17
>> Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> Mmm, I think that is c. p. 154 LSV CW v. 5.
>> I'm getting to that shortly,
>> thanks David
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> David Kellogg wrote:
>> > Andy:
>> >  > I think if you look at "Imagination and Creativity in the Child",
>> > where Vygotsky comments on the work of Ribot, you will find something
>> > apposite.
>> >  >
>> > Vygotsky, L.S. (2004). Imagination and Creativity in Childhood/.
>> > Journal of Russian and East European Psychology. /42 (1) 7-97.
>> >
>> >  > Ribot, who wrote that if man truly honored its great originators,
>> > there would a statue of a child in every Hotel de Ville in France,
>> > believes that at roughly age seventeen, every youth sacrifies
>> > imagination to realism, and this is the condition for entry into the
>> > work force.
>> >  > Vygotsky strongly contests this idea, both because he sees no
>> > contradiction between imagination and productive labor and because he
>> > believes that it is both preferable and more possible for art to
>> > saturate life than vice versa.
>> >  > David Kellogg
>> > Seoul National University of Education
>> >
>> > --- On *Wed, 5/18/11, Andy Blunden /<ablunden@mira.net>/* wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >     From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
>> >     Subject: [xmca] crisis at age 17
>> >     To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> >     Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2011, 5:46 AM
>> >
>> >     On page 196 of vol. 5 of LSCV's CW, Vygotsky refers to a crisis at
>> >     age 17. I don't know of anything more he said about this crisis.
>> >     Can anyone help me?
>> >
>> >     Andy
>> >     --
>> >
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >     *Andy Blunden*
>> >
>> >     __________________________________________
>> >     _____
>> >     xmca mailing list
>> >     xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> >     <http://us.mc1103.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> >     http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>> >
>>
>> --
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> Joint Editor MCA:
>> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744 <
>> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title%7Edb=all%7Econtent=g932564744>
>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857 <
>> http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
>> MIA: http://www.marxists.org <http://www.marxists.org/>
>>
>> __________________________________________
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>>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Joint Editor MCA:
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
> MIA: http://www.marxists.org
>
> __________________________________________
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>


-- 
*Robert Lake  Ed.D.
*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144
Phone: (912) 478-5125
Fax: (912) 478-5382
Statesboro, GA  30460

 *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
midwife.*
*-*John Dewey.
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