L. S. Vygotskii: The Cultural-Historical Theory, National Minorities and the Zone of Next Development

Abstract

Lev Semenovich Vygotskii (1896–1934) is widely recognised as one of the greatest thinkers, perhaps the greatest, in the field of child psychology. His work, however, has remained virtually unknown to psychologists and educators in the English-speaking West — partly because of the dearth of translated material and partly because of the philosophical gulf that separates his views from those of non-Marxists. Vygotskii’s approach to understanding the human mind has proved immensely fruitful in his own country and recent years have seen the beginnings of an attempt to benefit from this in both the United States and Western Europe. Vygotskii’s Cultural-Historical Theory of human mental development by its very nature lends itself to questions of the education of children from minority groups, whose backgrounds differ in substantial respects from the host culture. And of course, such circumstances provide an enormous natural experiment in which his Cultural-Historical Theory may be put to the test.

A note on transliteration and translation. Russian names have been transliterated throughout, according to British Standard BS 2979 (1958), without diacritics, hence Vygotskii and Luriya rather than Vigotsky, Luria, etc. The Russian verb ‘sozret’ may be translated into English equally as ‘to mature’ or ‘to ripen’. In the extracts translated from Vygotskii (1934a) the sense of ripening has been used throughout to maintain the force of Vygotskii’s parable of the foolish gardener.