Child Development Theories and Examples

Literate Practices And Schooling

We noted earlier that the mode of teaching in traditional schooling departs substantially from the natural teaching mode children experience in everyday life. Instead of being embedded in the course of joint goal-directed activity, teaching is disembedded and organized around domains of knowledge (Slaughter, 1982).
This property of formal schooling appears to be a product of literate practices. In all likelihood the very idea of a domain of knowledge and the disembedded teaching it encourages are two sides of a coin that could only be minted in a literate culture. Only with literacy are words or statements disembedded from the evanescent stream of human action and given the spatial permanence of things. Only with literacy are large bodies of such statements sorted into separate places that are internally organized according to the taxonomic schemes associated with domains of knowledge.
Based on the concept of domains of knowledge, teaching can be disembedded from the world of human purposes and reconceptualized as the transfer of a body of knowledge from one depository (books) to another (children). As Ong (1982:175-177) suggested, the message transfer model of communication appears to be a distortion based in literate educational practice. Fortunately, teachers can reembed their teaching in several ways and reintroduce the natural strategy of guided reinvention. They can show children how what they learn is relevant to everyday goals, and they can introduce the new goals related to domains of knowledge. Children can learn such goals as adding newly encountered facts to the appropriate domain, trying to find and fill gaps in existing domains, trying to reorganize or reconceptualize domains of knowledge, and trying to transfer organizational schemes from one domain to another. An important topic for research is how schooling practices can be organized to help children make such practices their own.
Modem science could in some ways serve as a model for such research, since it seems to be the epitome of a collaborative, literacy-based enterprise (Toulmin, 1972). Goody, one of the most insightful theorists of literacy effects, made the following argument (1977:46-47, emphasis added):
It is not so much scépticism itself that distinguishes post-scientific thought as the accumulated scepticism that writing makes possible; it is a question of establishing a cumulative tradition of critical discussion. It is now possible to see why science, in the sense we usually think of this activity, occurred only when writing made its appearance and why it made its most striking advances when literacy became widespread.
Here, the cumulative tradition of critical discussion provides a milieu within which scientific advances can occur rapidly.
It is only within this milieu that scientists have the ability to construct new insights so rapidly. Goody noted the implication of this fact for the traditional competence-performance distinction (p. 18):
[Studies of literacy effects] can be taken to indicate... that while cognitive capacities remain the same, access to different skills can produce remarkable results. Indeed, I myself would go further and see the acquisition of [literate] means of communication as effectively transforming the nature of cognitive processes, in a manner that leads to a partial dissolution of the boundaries erected by psychologists and linguists between abilities and performance.
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