Abstract
Vygotsky begins by saying that just as pedology does not undertake the study of heredity for its own sake, pedology takes the environment of the child only in relation to the child’s development. He suggests that relational indicators are the way to accomplish this. He then offers examples of what these relational indicators might look like: one for consciousness and one for speech. He concludes by asserting that ontogenesis is unlike other forms of development because of the presence of a final , ideal form as a guide from the very outset of development and drawing two important conclusions from this for all child development. First, higher functions always come to us from our social situation of development. Second, where the ideal form is not represented in the social situation, development will suffer.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
We have translated the word воспитание vospitanie as “enculturation” rather than “education” or “upbringing”, because it is more general than both: “enculturation” involves the teacher’s work as well as that of the parent. Note that “enculturation” is somewhat unusual and formal in English, while the corresponding Russian word is in general use.
- 2.
We have chosen to romanize the term переживание but leave it untranslated: “perezhivanie”. There is no obvious equivalent for it in the English language, and there is now some precedent using the term as is in some rather specialized books and papers (just as many untranslatable terms from English and other languages must be widely used in Russian). However, we urge the reader to bear three peculiarities in mind when they encounter the term.
First of all, it is not a technical term in Russian—it means, literally, “over-living” or “living over”, and it is commonly used to refer to an experience which has been undergone, thought about, and reflected over or narrativized in some way. A perezhivanie is opposed to a raw, unmediated, unsemanticized experience which has not been generalized, abstracted or transformed.
Secondly, it is a technical term in Vygotsky; he is using it in a system of thought, just as he uses terms like “concept” and “everyday” in “everyday concepts” as opposed to “scientific concepts” in Thinking and Speech Chapter Six (1987). It is a theoretical unit of analysis for the construction of the child’s consciousness (as a cell is a unit of analysis for understanding the construction of the child’s body tissues).
Thirdly, the term perezhivanie is somewhat algebraic—the value of perezhivanie changes as the child ages, so that for the infant Vygotsky uses the term to mean the sensation of satiety achieved while drinking milk, but for the adolescent he uses the term to mean the complex of thoughts and feelings towards an alcoholic mother from whom younger siblings must be protected. Note that it is a verb as well as a noun, and where it appears as a verb, we have translated as “to experience”, since the verb form is not used in specialized books and papers.
- 3.
This seems to refer to one of the clinical visits between Vygotsky’s lectures, when Vygotsky allowed his students to examine patients in the clinic.
- 4.
Notice the metaphorical use of мобилизуются mobilizuyiutsiya, quite literally, “mobilized” as in mobilizing an army. But in this case, the child is “mobilizing” the relevant psychological functions, the relevant memory, attention, perception, etc. These functions are “mobilized” according to their battle experience and talents.
Vygotsky offers the example of children whose parents are divorcing. The five-year-old may be relieved because it means that there will be less fighting in the house. He is “mobilizing” his dislike of trouble. A seven-year-old, on the other hand, may be more conscious of the implications and understands it will mean giving up one parent or the other—and perhaps even giving up a sibling (if the parents choose to separate the children).
Each child is “mobilizing” different traits of the personality, the one somewhat more optimistic and the other more tragic. Such traits may be self-reinforcing (i.e. the optimistic child may consistently select things which reinforce the optimistic view of affairs and the pessimistic one may do the opposite). But it is no more true that these traits are “mobilized” independently of the events in the environment than that they are “mobilized” from some army of characteristics that lies outside the child’s command.
- 5.
In all languages, there are proper nouns (like “L. S. Vygotsky”) and there are common nouns (“a teacher”, “a Russian”, “a man”). But there are no languages that have “proper verbs”—that is, verbs that refer to one unique action, event or happenstance which will never ever be repeated. This is strange, when you think about it, because all actions really are unique and no actions are ever exactly repeated: as Heraclitus says, we never step in the same river twice. Yet, every verb is a common verb: every verb is a generalization.
But, as Heraclitus also says, constant change is just as true of nouns as it is of verbs. This is especially so in Russian, which lacks “a” and “the” and which tends to treat all nouns as nonspecific unless there is a compelling reason to do otherwise (e.g. этот стул, “this chair”). The idea that a person should have the same name in infancy, childhood, youth and adulthood is a gross generalization; no person has exactly the same personality throughout life. The simple fact that human perezhivanie is so much richer than human vocabulary tells us that every word must be a generalization.
- 6.
We have translated the Russian word наглядного as “sensory-graphic” to try to bring out a dialectical contradiction that the Russian term expresses somewhat more exactly: the child’s “sensory-graphic” or “sensuous-illustrative” generalization is both more concrete and more intuitive than the adult’s semantic generalization. It is concrete, because it is based on perception, but it is intuitive because it is affective rather than simply adaptive in its response. As we’ll see in the next lecture, affective perception is a very important function in early childhood; the child’s attention and even his or her memory is strongly oriented to feelings about sights and feelings about sounds, and this orientation necessarily affects the child’s first generalizations. We know that children—and also people in a foreign language environment—are tend to rely a lot on perception, while adults and native speakers will not notice nuances of facial expression or voice quality because they are relying much more on word meanings.
- 7.
Vygotsky is apparently speaking of the “general genetic law”—the idea that functions appear twice, first as interpsychological categories and then, restructured, as intrapsychological ones. So speech appears before verbal thinking, and communication before generalization. Vygotsky recognizes that the general law remains in force (even, and even especially, when the child tries to “turn the tables” on the environment). But the concrete ways in which aspects of development occur must differ. Walking, for example, depends on the environment in one way, while talking depends on it in a very different one.
- 8.
Vygotsky is arguing against the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (i.e. child development is simply fast-forward biological evolution). But as with his earlier remarks nuancing the “general law”, Vygotsky is also arguing against the notion that “ontogenesis recapitulates sociogenesis”. This, along with the methodological criticisms Vygotsky made of doing psychological experiments in the field (1997: 33) does suggest that Vygotsky might not have been completely in agreement with Luria on the question of cross-cultural research and the effects of Soviet education on less developed areas of the USSR.
- 9.
It is true, as Vygotsky says, two deaf children raised by hearing parents who do not know sign language will create their own language, and it is also true, as Vygotsky says, that this language will not be a true sign language (see the work of Susan Goldin-Meadow 2003: 215–228). Actually, only about a third of deaf people are able to learn sign language at home with their parents, and these are mostly deaf children born to deaf parents who already sign. Deaf people whose parents do not sign have to learn sign language at school.
Vygotsky distinguishes very carefully between the physical disability of the child and the social consequences of that disability. But in a sense, the word “disabled” is wrong—Vygotsky would say that the child is not disabled but only “preabled”, first of all, because we don’t have the technical means to overcome the child’s defect and secondly because our cultural tools and signs have been developed ONLY for normal psychophysiology. It is not always easy to overcome physical defects with medicine. But it is always easy to develop cultural tools and signs for non-normal psychophysiology—e.g. Braille, sign language.
Similarly, it is easy for a progressive society to overcome the stigma that is attached to non-normal psychophysiology. Actually, what is difficult, at least from a technical point of view, is to create a society where people actually dislike their natural, normal features and figures, and will go to great lengths to wear shoes and alter their faces in accordance with commercially enforced standards of beauty. This too is a distinction between sociogenesis and ontogenesis that shows the relatively more designed and directed quality of the latter.
- 10.
The “nursery schools” referred to here are not simply day care centres for working mothers. They are orphanages, institutions for homeless children, treatment centres for children with chronic and fatal diseases like tuberculosis, and centres for the treatment of juvenile delinquents. When Vygotsky speaks of his clinical work, he is often speaking of his work with these “nursery schools”. That is why Vygotsky compares the upbringing of children in nursery schools to the upbringing of children in families.
When Vygotsky speaks of the “mass of material” that they have collected from nursery schools, he is referring to the measurements taken (height, weight, speech ability, practical skills) in institutions like these.
References
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Hearing gesture. Cambridge MA and London: Belknap.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The history of the development of the higher mental functions. In The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 4). New York: Plenum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vygotsky, L.S. (2019). The Problem of the Environment in 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_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0528-7_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-0527-0
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-0528-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)