Map 2.  2012 Presidential Election, by county

No Child Left Behind: the Stupid Party Makes its Mark

Importing a specific aspect of Finland’s education system, whether it is curricula, teacher training, special education, or school leadership, is probably of little value to those aiming to improve their own education systems. The Finnish welfare system guarantees all children the safety, health, nutrition, and moral support that they need to learn well in school. One lesson from Finland is, therefore, that successful change and good educational performance often require improvements in social, employment, and economic sectors. As described by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, separate elements of a complex system rarely function adequately in isolation from their original system in a new environment.

Figure 3.  Public Acceptance of     
Evolution, 2006: from "Why doesn't
America believe in evolution" by    
                   Jeff Hecht, Science: August 20, 2006  

No Child Left Behind: the Stupid Party Makes its Mark (continued)

The No Child Left Behind Act demands that the differences in academic acheivement between the classes and betweeen the races be erased in half a generation by the schools alone.  This is absurd.  It ignores the fact that class and race differences begin in early infancy and have as much to do with economic factors and neighborhood and cultural differences as with schools.

on use of the word "stupid"

The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . .  however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ,  g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior.  (Ceci, p. 22)


"The possibility that there exists a more restless relationship between intelligence and context, in which thinking changes both its nature and its course as one moves from one situation to another, is enough to cause shudders in some research quarters.  It represents a move toward a psychology of situations . . .  " (Ceci, p. xvi)

Excerpt 1 of 4

It is just in the last 1 percent of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity and technological capabilities have really blossomed.  It's been called "The Mind's Big Bang."  In our usual expansive sense of "mind," the history of the mind is surprisingly brief, certainly when compared with the long increase in brain size and the halting march of toolmaking. xiv 

 . . . there are emergent properties lurking in anything that produces a steep gradient. . .  I can imagine softwiring emergents in the brain intensively engaging in structured stuff at earlier ages.  The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects unless we do something about the rich getting richer. 177-8

"Yet once our education has the techniques to incorporate what is being learned about brain plasticity and inborn individual differences, we are likely to produce many more adults of unusual abilities, able to juggle twice as many concepts at once, able to follow a longer chain of reasoning, able to shore up the lower floors of their mental house of cards to allow fragile new levels to be tried out, metaphors and beyond--the survival of the stable but on a higher level yet again."   183

Intel Finalists: sociological profile

deconstructing the "white" finalists

A Brief History of the Mind:
From Apes to Intellect and Beyond, cont.

At the risk of some (but not much) exaggeration, the nation’s K-12 education system never adapted to the Second Industrial Revolution. Yet we are now, I believe, in the early stages of a Third Industrial Revolution, often called the Information Age. p. 6

Excerpt 2 of 4

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples.  This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable.  p. 29

Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete.  This history has not been written because, as children of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our distant ancestors: the difference between their world and the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . .  As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind.  They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administative tasks. p. 172-174

Cognitive development is not a normative, inevitable process.  It is an effect of history and politics, and can suffer reversal or collapse

Excerpt 3 of 4

 In Finland, for thirty years, theoretical frames for early childhood education and preschool have been outlined through Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach, Vygotsky's developmental theory, didactic theories and the psychological theories of learning, among which the latest is the constructivist theory of learning.

Bronfenbrenner's theory of ecological development (1979) has in Finland for almost thirty years been one of the most generally used theories to analyze the phenomena of early childhood education and, at the same time, of preschool. The importance of the theory of ecological development lies in the fact that personal development is seen in relation to different kinds and different levels of systems. This has introduced to the methodological principles of educational research a systems approach, according to which an object is studied as a system of its structural and functional relations.

Early childhood education and preschool have received strong theoretical stimuli from developmental psychology. This is true of Finland even today and evident also in this article. Developmental psychology theories are represented here by the often referred to theories of Bronfenbrenner and Vygotsky. They both focus their attention on human development and both have introduced a systems dimension to their ideas.

The Limits of Cultural Historical Activity Theory

Excerpt 4 of 4

Looking at the history of science, we find two different roots and basic ideas in scientific thinking: the idea and concept of evolution sensu Darwin, and the idea and concept of activity sensu Marx. . . .

 . . . the basic idea [of activity theory] is not "evolution," that is, the idea of adaptation to the environment, but "revolution," that is, change of the environment.  The dialectical analysis of human history, as it was done, for example, by Hegel and particularly by Marx, showed not only that humans adapt to the environment but also that they change it in accordance with their demands . . .  Activity is not an active adaptation to the environment but the transformation of the environment and--in inrtrerelation with it--of humans themselves.  Although this idea is not new, it has only begun to prove its explanatory potental.  Among the first to apply this idea to psychology were Vygotsky and one of his closest students, Leontiev.  (pp. 103-105; emphasis added)

1.  Transcendental Empiricism & Extended Mind

The rhizome is a figure borrowed from biology, opposed to the principle of foundation and origin which is embedded in the figure of the tree.  The model of the tree is hierarchical and centralized, wheas the rhizome is proliferating and serial, functioning by means of the principle of connection and heterogeneity.

Deleuze and Guatarri argue that the book has been linked traditionally to the model of the tree, in that the book has been seen as an organic unit, which is both hermetically sealed, but also a reflection of the world.  In contrast, the rhizome is neither mimetic nor organic.  It only ever maps the real, since the act of mapping is a method of experimenting with the real: and it is always an open system, with multiple exits and entrances.  In short, the rhizome is an 'acentred' system; the map of a mode of thought which is always 'in the middle'. (45)

 . . . the record of the last half-century is, philosophically, largely a record of the dawning exhaustion of an impressive vision (scientism) and the incompletely developed, still somewhat inchoate, possibilities of a promising alternative philosophy (pragmatism).  

By 'Cartesianism' or 'Cartesian realism' I mean any realism, no matter how defended or qualified, that holds that the world has a determinate structure apart from all constraints of human inquiry and that our cognizing faculties are nevertheless able to discern those independent structures reliably.  'Cartesianism' serves here as a term of art, as not confined to Descartes's own doctrine.  It ranges over pre-Kantan philosophy, Kant's own philosophy (quixotically), and even over the views of such contemporary theorists as Putnam and Davidson.  Twentieth-century analytic philosophy is, in this respect, thoroughly pre-Kantian or Kantian in a way in which Kant himself is pre-Kantian: it is an unabashed continuation of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy threatened in precisely the same way its ancestors originally were. . . .  The main feature of Hegel's strategy, which, in American  philosophy, is preserved (almost without attribution) among the classic pragmatists (particularly Dewey*) retires altogether the very idea of reference to a 'noumenal' world or a world the properties of which are seperable from from whatever they are said to appear to be to human inquirers, and reinterprets 'appearances' (Erscheinungen) as  open to the recovery of no more than a 'constructed' realism, that is, a realism shorn of the recuperative use of the 'Cartesian' habit of opposing or disjoining 'appearance' and 'reality' completely.  (If, that is, 'realism' is a proper term for rendering the sense of the Phenomenology's argument.)"  p. 49-50

---

*re. Dewey and Hegel, see James A. Good, A Search for Unity in Diversity: the "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey (Lexington Books,2006)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer,    

"It was a matter of calling the theme of the subject into question once again, that great, fundamental postulate which French philosophy,  from Descartes until our own time, had never abandoned.  Setting out with psychoanalysis, Lacan discovered, or brought out into the open, the fact that the theory of the unconscious is incompatible with a theory of the subject (in the Cartesian sense of the term as well as the phenomenological one). . .  Indeed, Lacan concluded that is was precisely the philosophy of the subject which had to be abandoned on account of this incompatibiity, and that the point of departure should be an analysis of the mechanisms of the unconscious." p. 56-7

Figure 1 and the analysis of the Intel finalists are evidence of an unprecented development in the human comedy.  One ought to view the multitude of reality shows to understand this--Jersey Shore is the most infamous, but the genre now grows exponentially.  Yet we have not grasped what has already happened, what is happening, and the ghastly future already past that lies before us.  The New York Times article The Rainbow That Follows ‘Jersey Shore’ misses what is the most striking feature of these shows: their cognitive primitivism.  

***It is already clear that in the U.S. fundamentalist whites and blacks have been disgorged from the project of modernity, and now constitute a new "barbarian" mass, concentrated in the central cities, inner suburbs, and the rural heartland (see map), and removed in toto from the possiblities of cognitive development implied by the term "education".  I use the term "barbarian" in a cognitive-linguistic sense, although the fascist violence of the "tea party" (see Ressent & MD) suggests an additional meaning to the term "barbarism": the lack of bourgeois self-control (see Walzer) evident whenever the sadistic rhetorical elements that are the central feature of the Right are deployed.

Hall et. al. have really grasped this, a result (it seems to me) of their participation in the everyday lives of their subjects.  Words such as poor or marginal hardly get at what they describe and analyze.

I too have been immersed in a range of cultural contexts (in the Detroit metro area) since 1975, from street networks and drug dealers through the working poor, unionized workers (auto, steel, telephone, etc), frontline supervisors and middle management, both as a teacher in a degree-granting adult education program (where I breached the fundamental rule of class etiquette), and as an "activist/organizer" (words that, given their common use, do not really apply, yet which cannot be abandoned).

4.  the Myth of the Working Class

S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008), p. 76-77; and Reginald Zelnick, Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 1999).  See also the Wellman interview.