Abstract
In this lecture, Vygotsky covers three general topic areas of his subject matter: definitions, laws and theories. Taking the word “pedology” literally, Vygotsky defines it as knowledge of the child, but he qualifies this as the knowledge of the child in development. His “laws” of development are rather loose-fitting descriptions that might apply to any form of development (development is “ADAM”: Asynchronic, Disproportionate, Alternating and Metamorphic). But in his conclusion, Vygotsky shows how taken together, his definition and his “laws” of development must lead us to reject the vast majority of extant theories on child development and construct an entirely new one.
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- 1.
Vygotsky is referring to the follow-up course to “Foundations of Pedology” which was apparently called “The Problem of Age” and is included, in a partial form, in the Korotaeva volume (see “Setting the Scene”). As we pointed out in “Setting the Scene”, the original lecture did not have any title when it was published in Vygotsky’s lifetime, but titles were added by Korotaeva in 1996 and changed in 2001. In her title of this lecture, предмет predmet can mean various things in Russian (just as “subject” means different things in English). It can mean “subject” (i.e. a school subject, a scientific discipline), “subject matter” and even “object” (i.e. the object of study, the object of a science). We have chosen “subject matter”, because Vygotsky does not use предмет in the first paragraph in discussing the discipline but he does use it in later paragraphs, discussing what the discipline studies.
- 2.
Vygotsky uses the term воспитание vospitanie, which can be translated as “upbringing”, “child-raising” or (at school age) “education”. No precise English equivalent exists; here we have chosen “enculturation”. It is accurate enough but more Latinate and less familiar in English than it would be in Russian. It is an everyday Russian word.
- 3.
Today, normal weight gain during the school years is around two or three kilograms a year, which is about ten percent of the child’s school entry weight. Contrary to what Vygotsky says here, a normal child with an adequate diet will indeed double her or his weight in elementary school (from around twenty kilos to forty or fifty kilos). Perhaps Vygotsky’s assertion that a school age child who doubles in age experiences only a miniscule weight gain should be seen in the context of widespread malnutrition in the USSR in the 1930s.
- 4.
Soviet citizens carried internal passports after age 16. These passports would, of course, include information like the time and place of birth. Passports did not allow travel abroad, but they did allow them to live, work and enjoy the social services of a particular city and also kept population movements to a minimum. Kolkhozniki (collective farm agricultural workers) did not have passports until 1974; to move to another place, they required permission from the local Soviet authorities.
Vygotsky uses six different terms to refer to two different concepts of age. On the one hand, he uses “passport age”, “astronomical age” and “chronological age” to refer to the child’s age in days, months and years, recorded in the child’s passport, measured in revolutions of the earth around the sun, or timed by revolutions of the hands of a clock. On the other, he uses “pedological age”, “speech age” and even “real age”. These terms refer to what the child can actually do, or rather, the relationship between what the child can actually mean, say, and do and what other children of his or her age can actually mean, say and do.
Age
Unit
Type
Organization
Passport age, astronomical age, chronological age
Abstract, equal units, e.g. years, months, days: aliquot and fungible
Absolute, i.e. progression from an origin
Simple, incremental, linear
Pedological age, speech age, real age
Concrete, unequal units, e.g. deviation of the moment of emergence of first utterances from the age average: non-aliquot and non-fungible
Relative, i.e. deviation from a mass average
Complex, developmental, uneven
- 5.
Vygotsky uses the word “предложений” predlozheniye which means a “sentence” or a “phrase”. Since a “sentence” in English is often defined orthographically (e.g. something that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period), we are translating it as a “phrase”, and assuming that what is meant is something that is semantically a command, offer, statement or question, but which is not necessarily grammatically any of them yet.
- 6.
In the Soviet university system, courses like this one would consist of lectures by professors followed by seminars led by junior lecturers or by teaching assistants. Lectures were mostly monologues, but seminars were quite often interactive, and students could make short presentations as well. Vygotsky seems to have brought in some of his patients for the students to examine during seminars.
- 7.
In this paragraph, the word “age” was inserted by the translators. All such insertions will be placed in square brackets and marked “—T” for “Translators”. The word “reflects” in this paragraph was inserted by Galina Serpionovna Korotaeva, who compiled the stenogrammes and first published them (Выготский 2001). All insertions by her will be placed in square brackets and marked “—GSK”.
- 8.
Vygotsky is making a distinction that is somewhat clearer in Russian than in English. Russian distinguishes between forms of oral speech (“речь”, rech’) on the one hand and the whole system of the native language (“родной язык”, rodnoy yazyk) on the other. It is the former which is developed mainly, though not exclusively, in early childhood; the latter continues central development throughout childhood and even beyond (e.g. in learning literacy or a foreign language). Without this distinction, the English reader may wrongly assume that Vygotsky is saying that the whole system of language is innate or triggered in early childhood, as some researchers (Charlotte and Karl Bühler in Vygotsky’s time, and Carol and Noam Chomsky in our own) maintain. Neither speech nor language is simply “acquired” from the environment; both are long-term achievements. Not mastery of the whole of language, but certainly mastering the sounds of oral speech, occupies “the first plane” of development in early childhood. Interestingly, this coincides with the period of most rapid growth in the brain, a point that Vygotsky will return to in a later lecture.
- 9.
Vygotsky often employs theatrical metaphors. The words “first plane” here may be thought of as the proscenium of the stage contrasted with backdrop and of course the wings and backstage where functions are also getting ready to play their roles.
- 10.
Korotaeva’s published version inserts the word цикличности tsiklichnosti (“cyclical”) for ритмичности ritmichnosti (“rhythmic”) in this paragraph. As we’ve seen, Vygotsky’s view of development combines two graphical schemata: on the one hand linear progress and on the other cyclical or spiral development. If we want to combine this into a single “line of development”, we would have to draw it as a sinusoidal curve, what Vygotsky calls a “wave form”.
- 11.
What Rousseau says is this: “The man must be considered in the man, and the child in the child. To assign each his place and settle him in it, to order the human passions according to man’s constitution is all that we can do for his well-being.” (Rousseau 1763/1979: 80). As Vygotsky says, this is very often cited, although rather more rarely quoted. When it is quoted, it is almost always quoted completely out of context, and so it sounds very much like Rousseau favours “child-centred education”. In fact, Rousseau is arguing against John Locke, who was the main proponent of what would be called child-centred education today. Locke famously believed that the child was a tabula rasa, a blank slate, and that educating the child was largely a matter of reasoning with the child, so that laws of reason would be written on that blank slate. Rousseau considers this folly: we only need reason when we are strong enough to fend for ourselves. But the child is, and should be, weak and dependent. Rousseau says: “Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting. We shall have young doctorates and old children. Childhood has its ways of seeing, thinking and feeling which are proper to it. Nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute ours for theirs, and I would like as little to insist that a ten-year-old be five feet tall as that he possess judgement. Actually, what would reason do for him at that age? It is the bridle of strength, and the child does not need this bridle.” (Rousseau 1763/1979: 90). Rousseau says the child does not need authority—because authority is not a natural law. What the child needs is natural law: “Let him know only that he is weak and you are strong, that by his condition and yours he is necessarily at your mercy. Let him know it, learn it, feel it. Let his haughty head at an early date feel the harsh yoke which nature imposes on man, the heavy yoke of necessity under which every finite being must bend.” (p. 91). Rousseau’s point is that the child must understand the power of adults as a completely natural power and not as one based in social law or human reason. This is not what we would call child-centred education today!
- 12.
In the stenogramme, this is виэмбрионального, viembrional'nogo, which is not really Russian. It seems likely that Vygotsky meant “non-embryonic”. The idea Vygotsky is critiquing is preformism, the notion that the child’s psyche develops in embryo and post-embryonically in the same preformed way.
- 13.
Vygotsky uses the Latin words here. In Vygotsky’s time, the central tendency in Soviet pedology—even in Vygotsky’s own circle—was probably a form of social behaviourism. Soviet educators believed that children are born equal, and they become unequal only through an unjust and radically unfair social environment. Children can become equal again by providing them with a radically egalitarian, equal opportunity environment in which to develop. This view was given the status of an objective, physiologically based behavioural science by the work of the Soviet behaviourists Pavlov and Bekhterev, but also in the work of Marxist psychologists Kornilov and Zalkind under whom Vygotsky worked. But it is, as Vygotsky says mischievously, a bourgeois view. By this, Vygotsky means above all that it is American: Watson and Thorndike are using it to argue that American education, by providing an equal opportunity environment in which (white) children can develop, can easily avoid the injustice of feudal aristocracy, monarchy and the general inequality of European societies. In our own day, the way in which the zone of proximal development has been interpreted as the internalization of the social environment—essentially the very process which Vygotsky criticizes in Piaget—shows how very strong this view remains, even in progressive education. But this view is not Vygotsky’s view, as he explains below and in subsequent chapters.
- 14.
Perhaps today the thing Vygotsky is trying to explain is rather clearer than the analogy that Vygotsky is using to explain it! Infancy, for example, prepares the way for the child to become a toddler. Crawling builds the muscles in the arms and legs, and babbling brings control over the speech organs. But crawling does not “contain” walking in an embryonic form and babbling doesn’t contain grammar and vocabulary in embryonic form. On the contrary, it is the objective inadequacy of the child’s crawling and the limitations of the child’s babbling that lead the child to take the first steps towards the new formations of toddlerhood—walking and speech. Similarly, the child’s walking and talking are the child’s—they are not simply copies of what the child sees in the environment, although they are certainly formed in interaction with the more complete, finished and “ideal” forms that the child finds there, as Vygotsky explains in Lecture 4.
References
Bakhurst, D. (2011). The formation of reason. West Sussex: Wiley.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1763/1979). Emile, or: On education. Translation and notes by Allan Bloom (ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Выготский Л.С. (2001). Лекции по педологии. Ижевск: Издательский дом “Удмуртский университет”.
Vygotsky, L. S. (2018). Vygotsky’s notebooks: A selection. R. van der Veer and E. Zavershneva (eds.) Singapore: Springer.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2019). The Subject Matter of Pedology. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0528-7_1
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