1) Intelligence exists. (Gould hashed this fallacy decades ago).
2) Verbal power is measured by skill in reading and writing. I have pointed out several times that in principle someone with verbal skill of the author of the Iliad could not necessarily pass a Freshman Comp Class, or even achieve a satisfactory score on a college-entrance exam. Pope's Dunciad can be seen as a lament at the demise of oral literacy.
3) The implicit identification of intelligence (see above) with written literacy (see above)
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Some further observations. The main skill required for elementary teaching is probably a highly developed ORAL literacy. (And of course oral literacy is the one skill that separates homo s. from earlier homo species. It clearly developed without formal training of any kind. Modern 'education' tends to devalue, even sneer at or repress this fundamental form of human intelligence. (In the 5th-c bce in Athens written evidence of a debt was considered less reliable than oral evidence. And Plato notoriously declared that his full thought could not be expressed in writing but only in speech. "Literate" literacy was considered intellectual inferior to oral literacy. And this is probably a correct assumption. The fullness of human thought simply cannot be fitted into the written word.
In an earlier post I did NOT say that children should from the age of 7 mix productive work with 'schooling." I said that it was _worth noting_ that Marx thought that in a better social order that would be the case. It offers a useful perspective of the necessary inferiority of social relations which isolate the young in rigidly in specially designed institutions called schools, practices which lead to the invention of such ridiculous beings as teenagers or pre-teens. Consider another possibility -- that the complete triumph of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, etc will lead to a huge burst of creativity and independent thought among U.S. children. They will be confined in such a rigid framework that in order to survive at all they will have to develop new and more powerful modes of resistance.
On schools and "prisons." As usual in lbo discussions any thought not conforming rigidly to accepted categories is immediately reduced to a vulgarization of itself. There is one glaring identity between prisons & public schools: both are compulsory. (This does not deny the great dissimilarities, but denial or trivialization f the identity shows a poverty of imagination, an inability to escape the clichés of contemporary culture.
Several decades ago a book appeared which unfortunately did not live up to the promise of its title: On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock_. It was a huge disappointment, but the book promised in the title still needs to be written.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Sean Andrews Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:08 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] School Debate: Central Focus
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 08:27, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [WS:] As I understand it, for the liberal & progressive types it comes
> in the form of two tacit assumptions. First is the belief that
> education, especially college education, is THE way to abolish social
> inequality. If social inequality is round us, it implies that the
> educational system is not good enough. By the same logic, if you pray
> for rain and the rain does not fall, you obviously are not praying
> hard enough.
>
> The second assumption, linked to the first, is that all people are the
> same - at least as wanting to have education, especially college
> education. If they do not get, it implies that the educational system
> sucks, for otherwise they would want to get. And believing that some
> people may want, say, a vocational training instead of college
> education is tantamount to reproduction of social inequality, per
> first assumption
These two are joined by the fact that working class jobs - crafts and other sorts of labor - are not culturally prized in the US because they aren't seen as intellectual or worthy of middle class salaries or existence. Everyone is supposed to want to get out of these jobs because they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. On the one hand, this is an excuse for not having a more equitable distribution system that rewards all kinds of labor - the system is only supposed to reward social climbers. And on the other hand, it is an implicit claim that manual labor does not involve mental labor. I came across this very nice documentary last weekend which looks at crafts and other kinds of manual labor.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/326776/the-tradesmen-making-an-art-of-work
One of the key sources is this book by Mike Rose called "The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker" http://web.mac.com/mikerosebooks/Site/The_Mind_at_Work.html
I haven't read it, but it sounds like a pertinent source for this discussion. On several levels I am implicated in the liberal assumptions you mention. The underlying bias is towards a particular kind of intelligence that is supposed to map onto a particular kind of class position. It is not all that different from the assumption that the endgame of capitalism is that we could all become entrepreneurs, which is a numerical impossibility. This goes back to my earlier, possibly misguided claim that it is important to challenge these frameworks more directly.
Sean
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