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THE ESSENTIAL Vygotsky THE ESSENTIAL VygotSky Edited by Robert W. Rieber City University ofNew l&rk New 1'&rk. New 1'&rk and David K. Robinson Truman State University KirkstJiJJe. Missouri In collaboration with Jerome Bruner Michael Cole New 1'&rk University University of Odifornia-San Dietl' New York. New York La Jolla. Odifornia Joseph Glick Carl Ratner City University of New 1'&rk Institute for Cultural Research and EtirKation New York. New York TrinidtuJ. Odifornia Anna Stetsenko City University ofNew York New 1'&rk. New York Springer Science+Business Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vygotskii, 1. S. (Lev Semenovich), 1896-1934. [Collected works of L. S. Vygotsky. English Selections] The essential Vygotsky 1 edited by Robert W. Rieber, David K. Robinson ; in collaboration with Jerome Bruner ... [et al.]. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychology. 1. Rieber, R. W. (Robert w.) II. Robinson, David Kent. III. Bruner, Jerome S. Oerome Seymour) IV. Title. BF121.V94213 2004 15O--dc22 2004047336 ISBN 978-1-4757-1010-6 ISBN 978-0-387-30600-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-30600-1 © 2004 by Springer Science+ Business Media N ew York Originally published by Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers in 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 2004 1098765432 1 A C.1.p. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. AII rights reserved No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, elec tronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Pub lisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a com puter system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Permissions for books published in Europe: [email protected] Permissions for books published in the United States of America: [email protected] Dedicated to the memory ofAlexander Luria and with gratitude to the l1gotsky family, especially G. L. l1godskaya Prologue: Reading Vygotsky MICHAEL COLE, Laboratory ofComparative Human Cognition, University ofCalifornia, San Diego Writing a prologue for a collection like this is truly astonishing to me for many reasons. It is now more than forty years since I first encountered the name of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, a Russian scholar born just before the start of the twentieth century. By virtue of my education in the middle of the twentieth century as an experimental psychologist who specialized in learn ing, I was reasonably well trained in that form of positivist behavioral sciences that took it as a simple truth that the errors of the originators of the discipline of psychology were a thing of the past. To my generation of experimental psychologists, the history of psychology was the uplift ing story of that long trail of errors that had been overcome by recent scientific advances. Such history served primarily as a cautionary tale about not succumbing to the temptations of subjective, unscientific speculation but instead mastering the quantitative methods that had been pioneered during recent years, leading psychology out of its dark past into a genuinely sci entific future that will benefit humankind. A corollary of this scientific worldview was a strong claim for the continuity of species, such that general laws of human behavior could be studied at least as effectively by studying the behavior of rats as by studying the behavior of college sophomores; the choice of "subject" was merely a matter of convenience. Rats had the advantage that one could control their histo ries with moral impunity, while at least some consideration had to be given to avoiding harm ing undergraduates. On the other hand, rats had to be taken care of over the weekend, while undergraduates were the responsibility of university officials who enforced the procedures of in loco parentis. Needless to say, the same notions of continuity applied to age differences. The study of children was a relatively small, and relatively low-status, enterprise. The major mechanism of developmental change favored by psychologists was learning from the environment, using procedures which were often directly modeled on procedures initially developed to study rats, dogs, and cats. Yet another widely held belief, which admitted of a few exceptions, was that, by and large, scientific psychology could be adequately mastered by knowing how to read only English and, moreover, by restricting one's reading primarily to research conducted in the United States. The few exceptions to this rule do not, so far as I can tell, form any pattern. Frederick Bartlett's experiments on remembering were well known, but his book on thinking was not. Pavlov was of vii viii Prologue course required reading because American behaviorists of the 1920s and 1930s adopted condi tioned reflexes as a major mechanism of learning, but his physiological theories were largely ignored. This situation was, of course, about to change. In retrospect the signs of change were per vasive. Some were geopolitical. When the Soviet Union put a satdlite into space, the term "sput nik" entered the English language, and suddenly a psychology of learning that could transform American education became a compelling national need. Outstanding physicists, biologists, and mathematicians began joint research projects with psychologists. Perhaps not acciden tally, the psychologists began to consider the possibility that rats did not, after all, offer an ade quate modd of learning in college students. I take it as more than accidental that the "cogni tive revolution" began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where somehow professors from a few departments at Harvard and MIT discovered different disciplines and even the other end of Massachusetts Avenue (which connects those revered institutions). Why Is Vygotsky Relevant Today? So, one of the first things we might want to think about is why you are reading the pro logue to a sdection of essays by a Soviet, Jewish, Belorussian psychologist who died seven decades ago after a brief career. Little of his work was published during his lifetime, even in Russian, and the number of copies of those publications was very small. Some of his work was known to a few specialists in human devdopment and abnormal psychology during his lifetime, thanks in large part to the efforts of Alexander Luria, a contributing editor to the Journal o/Genetic Psychology. and in part to Eugenia Hanfmann (1953), who replicated Vygotksy's research on concept formation and published in English. Neverthdess, Vygotsky was not well known within his own country and had nothing of the international stature of his great contemporary, Piaget, nor of Werner, Kohler, Gesell, and other "father figures" of the study of human devdopment. It is only in the past two decades that Vygotsky's work has become influential in Russia and on the international scene, where some of his work has been translated into many languages. It has been influential not only among devdopmental psychologists, but has become increasingly important to other disciplines, such as anthropology and sociology, and in the application of psychology in such areas as education, human-computer interface design, and the organization of work. What can account for this "Vygotsky boom" of recent years? The Publication of Thought and Language Prior to 1962, when MIT Press published a translation ofVygotsky's Thought and Lan guage, he was best known in the United States for a block-sorting task that resembled classifi cation methods used by American psychologists. This translation was blessed by two circum stances. First, the lead translator, Eugenia Hanfmann, was the daughter of a Russian emigre who had studied in Germany with Kurt Lewin, and for whom Vygotsky was more than a myth of the past. Second, Jerome Bruner, a leader in organizing the cognitive revolution in the United States, wrote the book's preface. (He has also contributed an introduction to the present volume.) Prologue ix Bruner's education had included time with William McDougall, an Englishman who became one of the giants of early American psychology. At that time the Department of Social Rela tions at Harvard retained a historically oriented, interdisciplinary faculty who respected the intellectual contributions of past psychologists from many countries, as well as the potential contributions of other social sciences to psychology. Consequently, Bruner was able to draw connections between Vygotsky's ideas and those of other, previously influential scholars in a way that created an "intergenerational bridge" to the 1960s. Moreover, Bruner was himself turn ing to the study of the role of culture in child development with a special focus on education, and hence he could appreciate the importance ofVygotsky's formulation of cultural-historical psychology and convey that importance in a clearly understandable manner. Despite these auspicious advantages, the publication of Thought and Language did not evoke massive interest in Vygotsky, although his work did gradually begin to attract more atten tion. There are several potential reasons for its modest impact. First, the threat of conflict between the United States and the USSR reached its zenith that year in the Cuban missile crisis. To dis play enthusiasm for a Soviet psychologist who declared himself to be a Marxist was, at the very least, to court suspicions of one's allegiances. The translators, in fact, excised a significant por tion of the book on grounds that it was either repetitious or polemical. Nonetheless, Marx, Engels, and Plekhanov all remain in the text, even if their appearance was abbreviated. Second, the book still required reasonable familiarity with a wide range of early-twentieth-century psychologists and presumed an interest in developmental psychology, features which were unlikely to find a broad audience at the time.