All articles
Articles by tag "freedom":
2017, 1
p. 12–21
MORE
31
There is Vygotsky and Vygotsky. The Vygotsky who is still alive in his works and their thoughtful readers, and the Vygotsky «from textbooks». This is what Vygotsky looks like «in textbooks» schematically. According to his conception, a child does not develop on his own; he draws his «powers» for development from the sociocultural environment, which is created for him by an adult. To be more precise, it is created by his hands, his mind and, if he is lucky, by his heart. That is why when doing it, an adult acts not «on his own behalf» but «on his behalf and the behalf of the authority» of culture itself, which formed historically when he merely acts as an intermedium between culture and the child. In collaboration with an adult, a child learns cultural patterns – ways of interacting with human things, models of human behavior, samples of world perception, and criteria for evaluating what is happening in the world, deciphering «languages» – the symbols of the culture... And then he applies these patterns and codes to certain situations. It seems reasonable. But the social factors of child development (which included communications with an adult) were written about long before Vygotsky. Usually they were described as something imposed externally, something directive. From this perspective, development appeared to be a gradual «social enslavement», and they searched for the sources of freedom in the primal game of Mother Nature’s forces, which is natural for such logic. However, this «mother» is in some ways is a more rigid «dictator» than society. In fact, Vygotsky’s ideas are much deeper and more interesting.
Keywords: