I believe it is extremely important to remember that constructing one's own
reality does not mean, 'do whatever feels good or do whatever one wants to
do'. Creativity definitely comes from allowing constuctivist thinking,
however, healthy development also means having boundaries and understanding
that there will be consequences for staying within those boundaries or
leaving those boundaries. Children left to do whatever they want do, do not
know what to do. This would coincide with my criticism of Engstrom excluding
empirical evidence(scientific boundaries) from his expanding by learning
theory. I would fully suspect that if including scientific data within his
LBE, certainly a grand undertaking, then Engstrom would have a comprehensive
psychological methodology that would come the closest to resolving Vygotsky's
crisis in psychology. Remember, Vygotsky often referred to Kohler's work
with apes, it is not by accident that Vygotsky referred to empirical
scientific data in his psychological theories. Although he had criticism for
Watson's theory he writes, "While disagreeing with Watson's thesis concerning
the role of whispering, we believe that he has hit on the right
methodological approach: To solve the problem, we must look for the
intermediate link between overt and inner speech(Thought and Language pg.
85).
It is erroneous to use a historical perspective and exclude the behaviorist
approach to learning. Whether we are discussing development or learning we
cannot ignore behaviorist theory.
What do you think?
Eric
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