Education, Part 2b
Cultural History
“Phylogeny and
cultural history in ontogeny”
As can be seen from the sub-title
of this article, Mike Cole is never afraid to use long, unfamiliar words, which
makes it not to be ideal for use as a reading. It is also a bit too long. But
there are good reasons for including it.
One is that like Vygotsky’s
article, it shows an educationalist at work who refuses any boundaries to the
work of an educationalist. Not even the “Arrow of Time” is sacred for Cole.
Education is involved in “Phylogenesis” (the creation of the human type,
including the physical type), as well as “Ontogenesis” (the creation of the
individual human life-trajectory).
Another reason for using this
article is because it is an available example of Cole’s writing, with Professor
Cole being a major figure in education theory, and the current principle
challenger to the hegemony of the ideas of the late Jean Piaget.
Another reason is to show the
continuity between Engels, Vygotsky and Cole. We will in due course discover
that this continuity embraces other educationists. None of these thinkers is an
isolated case. There is a strong school of educational theorists with
sufficient worked-out theory, based on empirical research, and tested in
practice, to support a revolutionary education system in South Africa, or
anywhere else on earth. Jean Piaget’s utilitarian-bourgeois ideas are not the
end of educational history.
Something else to look at in
this essay is the comparison between Japan and the USA in motherhood behaviour,
early schooling, baseball and corporate culture. All of that is in Part 5.
In particular, the preference
of the Japanese for (early childhood) classes of 15 or more corresponds with
the experience of the CU, where dialogue is the means of learning, and “keeping
the pot boiling” is the main practice. In the CU, we relax when attendance
reaches the level of 15, because at that level of attendance it is not at all
difficult to sustain a discussion for the given period, and so to leave with
more questions than answers, as we should.
What one might want to
discuss, using this article as a common stock, could be the outer boundaries of
educational theory, or lack thereof. In South Africa, the view presented for
public discussion by the bourgeois mass media is that school education is a
limited thing, watched over by anxious parents and bossy teachers, that
produces a narrowly-restricted result, or at best a sparse set of “outcomes”,
the whole being gauged by the matriculation examinations.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Cole, Phylogeny
and cultural history in ontogeny, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment