Education, Part 2a
The socialist alteration of man
Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet
scientist, educational researcher, theoretician and practitioner who died more
than 80 years ago. At the present time his is one of the most recognised names
in the history of pedagogical studies, and his fame appears to be growing.
Later in the course we will
move to a text by Andy Blunden explaining Vygotsky’s Theory of Child Development.
Among other things, that paper underlines Vygotsky’s attention to detail, based
on close observation of children. Vygotsky’s reputation rests upon his
collection and organisation of empirical data, as much as upon the theoretical
science that built upon these data, and upon the wider and revolutionary
science of his time.
In today’s attached and
downloadable text it becomes clear that Vygotsky found it necessary to place
his work within an overviews of education, and of the place of education within
the most comprehensive view of humanity and of humanity’s historical and
prehistorical development.
In a SADTU document that we
will return to later in this course, a diagram is used which shows the field of
education as bounded on four sides by a band that contains the words
“Political”, “Cultural”, “Social” and “Economic”.
But in fact these four are
not distinguishable from each other in any organic sense. They do not represent
any kind of unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. “Political”, “Cultural”, “Social”
and “Economic” are all words for the same thing.
It is necessary to place
education within a context external to the “classroom”, so as to find a broad definition
of education, and not a weak, contingent and utilitarian one. The separation
into virtual bullet-points of “Political”, “Cultural”, “Social” and “Economic”
tells us nothing. They all represent one thing, which is “Politics”.
Acknowledging this allows us
to develop the context, not as a list, but as a concentric spheres. This is
what we are doing in this part of our course on “Education”, starting with
Lenin, and moving to Vygotsky, Cole, Engels and Spinoza.
Later in the course we will
come to Hegel, whose philosophy of human development is the one that is to this
day still the most advanced, most extensive, and most concrete philosophy
available. Hegel’s philosophical system is the one that was used by by Karl
Marx, Frederick Engels, V I Lenin – and Lev Vygotsky.
The contextual sphere around
education would be the politics of the country and of the moment, or in other
words what is called the “conjuncture”, made up of the balance of class forces and
the specific, material circumstances of the place and time.
In bourgeois education,
consideration of such context is to a large extent, if not entirely, excluded.
History, for example, as taught in school, stops short of the present moment,
and refrains from connecting the past to the present so as to draw political
lessons. The Constitution might be taught, but in a conservative way, so as to
present it (falsely) as separate and apart from the politics of the moment.
As we have seen with Paulo
Friere, a pedagogy that would suit the oppressed majority of the people must
refuse to exclude the facts of daily political life from education in this way.
The classroom of the oppressed must rightfully be in the world, and not
isolated from the world.
Lenin helps us to see
education in a general context of class conflict. Lenin places education within
a full political-theoretical context, thereby allowing it to be understood as
part of human history in general.
The text given here shows
that Vygotsky felt the need to recognise both the political struggles of the
moment (i.e. the formation of the revolutionary proletarian republic, the
Soviet Union), and also the revolutionary theory upon which those struggles
were based. He needed to place education within the lived, political society,
and within in the on-going development of human beings as a whole.
This leads Vygotsky to suggest
that there must be a theory of human development that is not only spiritual and
subjective, but that is also material, and even biological. We will look
further at this question in the next item within this part, noting the line of
thought, without necessarily endorsing every aspect of it. The point is to
realise that education exists within the widest possible human context, whose
boundaries are the boundaries between the socially known, and the unknown.
Suffice it here to read
Vygotsky’s own words, and to note that this most famously experimental and
empirical of educationists (in the sense of basing his understanding on
observation of real children) found it necessary to reach out to the furthest
margins of pre-history, and out into the disciplines of biology, evolutionary
science, and philosophy, so as to be able to locate and to brace his work in a
firm fashion.
Humanism is that kind of
philosophy that says that human beings create themselves, and that the more
they do so, the more socially conscious (i.e. scientific) they become of what
they are doing. The more conscious is human development, the faster is the rate
at which it proceeds. As Engels and Spinoza both remarked: Freedom is the
recognition of necessity. Having understood necessity, humans are free to grasp
it. This is the only kind of freedom that they have.
Without a sight of a wider
context, the educator is proceeding as if blindfolded.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Vygotsky, The socialist
alteration of man, 1930.
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