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 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. 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 definition
of education, and not a weak, contingent and utilitarian one, it is necessary
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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Post a Comment