Understanding practice: The acquisition of a child by a learning disability

Conceived as a deficiency in capacity, feeblemindedness isolates the subject by virtue of that deficiency. In seeking a definite cause of feeblemindedness one is denying that it can have any meaning – that is, a history – or that it may correspond to a situation . (Maud Mannoni, 1972, p. 44) The interiority of pains, afterimages and spots before the eyes cannot impugn the overt, public character of cognitive skills, or the external aims of practical moral decisions. It is only when mental activity regains its place within everyday life, therefore that its outer directness becomes finally clear. (Stephen Toulmin, 1985, p. 17) The emergence of institutionalized education is accompanied by a crisis in diffuse education, which goes directly from practice to practice without passing through discourse. Excellence has ceased to exist once people start asking whether it can be taught, i.e., as soon as the objective confrontation of different styles of excellence makes it necessary to say what goes without saying, justify what is taken for granted, make an ought-to-be and an ought-to-do out of what had up to then been regarded as the only way to be and do. (Pierre Bourdieu, 1977, p. 200) Sometimes if you try harder and harder, it just gets worser and worser. (Adam, 1977, third grade) From 1976 to 1978, Michael Cole, Lois Hood, and I gathered a series of videotapes from one classroom of eight- and nine-year-old children in various settings. Our effort at the time was to locate the children “thinking” aloud in the hope that we could identify naturally occurring examples of some mental activities that seemed so well defined in experimental settings.