Education, Part 2a
The socialist alteration of man
Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet scientist, educational researcher,
theoretician and practitioner. 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.
A text by Andy Blunden, explaining Vygotsky’s Theory of
Child Development, was distributed prior to the commencement of this course,
and it will be used again later in the course. 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 rests upon these data and upon 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. Taken together, they do not represent any kind of
unity-and-struggle-of-opposites. Actually, “Political”, “Cultural”, “Social”
and “Economic” are all words for the same thing.
To place education within a context external to the
“classroom”, and so to find a broad, and not a weak, contingent and utilitarian
definition of education, one needs to go to wider concentric spheres. 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 wider set of 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, Lenin and Vygotsky.
The first external sphere 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. In bourgeois education, consideration of this context is to a
large extent, if not entirely excluded. History, for example, as taught in
school, stops short of the present moment. The Constitution might be taught,
but in a conservative way, so as to present it (falsely) as separate 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.
Moving further out, Lenin helps us to see education in a
general context of class conflict. Lenin places education within a full
political-theory 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 of these concentric spheres, namely the political struggles of
the moment (i.e. the formation of the revolutionary proletarian republic, the
Soviet Union), and 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.
Which leads Vygotsky to insist 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. 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 this 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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