About me
I am a semester away from getting my MLIS. I plan to be a children's librarian More »
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Location:
United States, Chicago, IL -
Current role:
Graduate Student in Library Science -
Gender:
Female -
Areas of expertise:
Early Childhood Development and Learning, emergent literacy, Learning and Brain Science, Cognitive Diversity, Public Libraries, Librarianship, punk rock, Children's Literature
Comments
Talk: Steven Pinker chalks it up to the blank slate– November 21, 2008
I think Pinker is the only person still arguing Nature vs. Nurture? maybe he missed the memo...He simply takes one narrow metaphor and reverses it "the blank slate theory" and repackages it:"not blank slate theory." This isn't exactly a new argument. The twin studies?Please! First those studies are so, so old! Second, patterns in gray matter do not directly correlate to personality traits. Third, NYer cartoon...ugh! lame!...Plus, of all people you are going to take on, Steven Jay Gould? I think "the blank slate" isn't necessarily the best way to describe the human brain at birth, but it really just a way of dispelling a social darwinism. If you are going to try to interrogate important thinkers, at least have the balls to choose the core argument, such as, "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups races, classes, or sexes are innately inferior and deserve their status." (Mismeasure of Man, 1981(?)) He spends more time framing himself as the victim and making snarky comments. The problem is that these are not new ideas. nor is using the practice of using pseudoscience to support them. Maybe "Blank Slate" is the best metaphor, but how's this from Dr. Jack P. Shonkoff, M.D. from Harvard Center on the Developing Child: "Brains are built over time, neural circuits are wired in a bottom-up sequence, and the capacity for change decreases with age...The interaction of genes and experience shapes the architecture of the developing brain, and the active agent is the serve and return nature of childrens relationships with the important adults in their lives" Nature AND Nurture. Sorry, to be rough, but this isn't just a harmless idea. This quack theory put people in insane asylums, slums, bad schools, forced sterilization, slavery, jail and worse