Greetings, comrades! One of two threads I would like to initiate is a discussion of Lev Vygotsky as a founder of scientific socialist psychology: far from demonstrating such a term to be an oxymoron, Vygotsky, in my humble view, demonstrated so powerfully that a psychology based on the same philosophical premises as Marx and Engels started from in their study of society was such a powerful analysis that Stalin moved to suppress it out of fear of its ability to add its power of analysis to the other analyses which might expose how little Stalinism had in common with scientific socialism, or with any other science that shared its premises. Capitalist apologists, of course, had their own reasons to exclude Vygotsky from their curriculum. OK, there's my thesis in a nutshell: back to you, comrades!
I'm currently doing Childcare and education and as a part of it were studying Piaget, a child psychologist , we do a bit of Vgotsky but nothing in depth in the way we study Piaget . Firstly , Piaget was quite ignorant in his assesment of how a child develops , he stated at certain ages children are able to a certain thing , e.g at around 4 they should be able to write there name . With Piaget development came before learning as if the child was automatically able to do it , this is an exaggeration of Piagets ideas but he ignored the enviornment in which a child is brought up and the impact it would have on a childs development . Vgotsky on the other hand was almost the oppisite and in keeping with dialectical marxism proposed childrens learning ranges quite differently, he proposed children developed at differend times with accordance to the childs upbringing and societal impact . He did agree with Piaget: that their were certain stages in childs development but instead of proposing that a child won't be capable of certain tasks at a certain age he proposed that a Techer or parent should introduce certain tasks and ideas to a child and help them develop their cognitive skills even if their below the average age of being able to do this , this is because the enviornment (learning wise) contributions the majority of the dictation of wheter a child is able to do something or not . Most teaching is done by Vgotskian methods though many claim their doing it by Piagets methods . If this was true their wouldn't be any major teacher student interaction and students would be left develop on their on learning wise to a large degree . Instead we see Vgotsky's ideas coming to the fore in the example of teacher student interactions but also in what makes up a huge part of Vgotsky's ideas on cognitive development , student/student interaction , Scaffolding of knowledge to reach a collective agreement this is done mostly in the form of peer study groups but also of teachers putting students into a group and asking them a question . Students develop individually and socially alot faster when their in a collective group of other students , this dismisses Piagets ideas and shows that Vgotsky was clearly on to something . I know this isn't really very political just thought it would help in explaining some of his ideas with regards to a certain part of psychology .
