Friday, October 30, 2015

Thoughts from Thinking and speech (Vygotsky)

I'm returning to thinking about education as a practice, and this has involved me in reading more theory over the past couple of weeks.  To take a break this evening, I decided to watch a video from Nicolai Veresov on Vygotsky. In watching it, I was drawing an analogy between speech and teaching, and came up with the following thoughts.

Teaching is a means of social interaction. We lose the sense of it if we break it down into its component parts.

Teaching combines the function of social interaction and the function of thinking.

View Teaching as a unity of thinking and communication.

The social world is the engine of development. Other factors control the rate, but are not the engine. (pure Vygotsky here)


Adult teaching is a function of society. If you want to truly understand it, you have to see how its assumptions developed in the child. That is, consider the educational histories of both the students, and the teachers.