[Xmca-l] Re: Volume One of Pedology of the Adolescent Published in Korean

[David Kellogg]

Mike:

You know, the weird thing is that Vygotsky makes exactly your point about
his own development and those of his colleagues in the author's preface to
T&S. He says that they had to discard a good deal of material which seemed
completely erroneous, and they went down several rabbit holes that turned
out to be dead ends..

I find this weird for two reasons. First of all, I have always thought that
the periodization of Vygotsky's thinking is overblown (e.g. Minick's
preface to T&S in he CW and also in the Intro to Vygotsky volume edited by
Daniels). When we look back at the "instrumental" period (a term Luria uses
but Vygotsky himself eschews in his letters) and on the "psychological
systems" paper, we can see that the rudiments of important ideas in the
pedology. "Instrumental" psychology becomes the Social Situation of
Development conceptualized as a relation between the child and the
environment rather than a material setting on which the child acts wiht
instruments. The "psychological system of functions" is a rudimentary form
of the idea of a Central Neoformation and a Central Line of Development
which exchanges places with Peripheral Neoformations and Peripheral Lines
of Development. So it sees to me that the three different Vygotskies
discovered by Minick and Gonzalez Rey and others are really artifacts of
what happened after Vygotsky's death; there is one Vygotsky, and the key to
the anatomy of "Ape, Primtive, Child" is in the anatomy of the pedology.

Secondly, although Vygotsky does say this about discarding a good deal of
material and going down rabbit holes that turned out to be dead ends, there
is this weird problem with Chapter Five. It is, very clearly and evidently,
about adolescents, and its main argument is that concepts do not and cannot
emerge until after the Crisis at Thirteen. And yet the very next chapter,
Chapter Six, is equally clearly and equally evidently about school
children, and its main argument is that the complexes need to be left, like
Mary's Little Lamb, at the school door. One of these chapters must be a
rabbit hole that turned out to be a dead end. But which one?

dk

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Book with the Seoul Vygotsky Community

Volume 1 of "Pedology of the Adolescent", 분열과 사랑 (in the Korean language)

http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=148240197


On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:36 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Congratulions to you and your team, David. We all look forward to an
> English edition.
>
> All those issues good for discussion.
> Where does the text on
> Pedology  fit in the instrumental— functional systems- perezhivanie
> Sequencing of his phases of theorizing?
>
> Mike
>
> On Mon, May 28, 2018 at 6:00 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> The Seoul Vygotsky Community is proud to announce the publication of the
>> first volume of  Vygotsky's "Pedology of the Adolescent" in Korean (see
>> link below). Some of this material has been circulated on our list, but it
>> has never actually been published in any language except Russian.
>>
>> Like the upcoming publication of Vygotsky's pedological work in French
>> (and, eventually, in English), I think the material speaks for its own
>> importance in theory and in methodology. But I also think it addresses (at
>> least) three practical questions which keep coming up on this list.
>>
>> a) How can a Zoped be measured in years? The Binet tasks are utterly
>> inadequate for this purpose, as Thorndike, Vygotsky, and even Binet said at
>> the time. So we need neoformations that are observable in the data of
>> everyday life, e.g. language. The first chapter of this volume, never
>> published in Engliish, gives these for the Crisis at Thirteen.
>>
>> b) What does the child think with before the child is thinking with
>> concepts? In Thinking and Speech, the chapter on concept formation in
>> adolescence is actually placed BEFORE the chapter on preconcept formation
>> in elementary school. The chapters in this volume on the role of emotion as
>> a "sputnik" of development not only explain how the adolescent is thinking
>> during concept formation but also why.
>>
>> c) What is the status of the phrase "psychological tools"? Vygotsky
>> himself uses it at one point. Then he criticizes it and says that people
>> who use this are simply handwaving. This material was written at exactly
>> the point in his thinking he made that criticism, and...he does not use it.
>> Instead, he uses the idea of "semanticization" in order to describe the
>> "intro-volution" of structures.
>>
>> This volume has important things to add on all of these issues, but it's
>> actually little more than the kind of preamble we find in the first five
>> chapters of HDHMF or the first four chapters we find in T&S. In the next
>> volume, which we are working on right now, Vygotsky says that the last
>> great critical period of childhood is the product of the "non-coincidence"
>> of general anatomical growth, sexual maturation, and socio-cultural
>> maturity. Growth goes on a bit later (thanks to diet), puberty happens
>> earlier and earlier (ditto), but the child's ability to reproduce his or
>> her own labor and that of a family seems to be endlessly put off by our
>> culture.
>>
>> David Kellogg
>> Sangmyung University
>>
>> New Book with the Seoul Vygotsky Community
>>
>> Volume 1 of "Pedology of the Adolescent", 분열과 사랑 (in the Korean language)
>>
>> http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ItemId=148240197
>>
>>
> --
> A man's mind-what there is of it- has always the advantage of being
> masculine, - as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most
> soaring palm, - and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.
> ---George Eliot
>
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