[Xmca-l] Re: Crises and stages/ages

[Andy Blunden]

Mmm, thanks David.
I stand my position in making the social situations of development the 
unit of analysis for child development.
"Cause" is a problematic concept, but with an appropriate unit, it can 
work.
Critical development *will* take place on two conditions: (1) the 
child's perception of its own needs have outgrown the existing 
relationships and role, and (2) those in the child's environment are 
prepared to go along with (at least) the development. That gives a very 
significant causal role to the neoformation (which as a medical term I 
take to have a largely internal referent), but is not a sufficient 
cause. And even then, (1) is a relational condition.

Also, I wonder if I could offer an apologia for Leontyev. As the 
recently deceased former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, 
famously said: "Life wasn't meant to be easy." I think this is 
profoundly true and so did Vygotsky, but as Fraser discovered, it is a 
very difficult thing for a political leader to say, and I think also for 
a child psychologist. But of course, it is true. But the child is only 
half of the turbulence that breaks out when the child sets out to change 
its position in the family in the only way they know. The political 
atmosphere had turned decisively away from the idea that child rebelling 
against their parents was a good thing. Whereas Vygotsky said: "People 
with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who 
possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong 
personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls." Not the 
sort of thing the Soviet leaders wanted to hear any more!

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> What we're translating here in Korea is the second half of the manuscript
> published by Galina Serpionovna Korotaeva in the Department of German
> Philology at the Udmurt University in Izhevsk in 2001. It's available in
> Russian on the Vygotsky Internet Archive as the second part of  Лекции по
> Педоклоии
> <https://www.marxists.org/russkij/vygotsky/pedologia/lektsii-po-pedologii.pdf>,
> 1935. We published the first part of this book in Korean in January:
>
> http://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?ISBN=8994445803
>
> The second part (on Crises and Stable Periods) should be ready in January
> 2016.
>
> The Korotaeva manuscript hasn't been translated into any language, but
> there are parts of it in Volume Five of the English Collected Works Volume
> Five, and the passage that I quoted can be found, more or less, on p. 191.
>
> Unfortunately, that's not true for much of the manuscript.
>
> Кризис 3 и 7 дет
>
> (The Crisis at Three and the Crisis at Seven)
>
> Негативная фаза переходного возраста
>
> (Negative Phases of the Transitional Age)
>
>  Школьный возраст .
>
> (School Age)
>
>  Мышление школьника
>
> (Thinking in the School Child)
> As you can see, this isn't in the Collected Works at all, so as Mike says
> it's well worth revisiting the discussion.
>
> But I can think of three non-textological reasons for revisiting this
> material.
>
> a) Almost ALL of the interpretations of the zone of proximal development
> used in the West are non-critical--that is, they see "development" as a
> kind of improved way of adapting to the environment. But even a cursory
> reading of this manuscript makes it clear that is not what Vygotsky means
> when he speaks of development (even if we didn't know this already from the
> emphasis on the development of free will in HDHMF).
>
> b) Andy's interpretation of the text in Volume Five overemphasizes the
> social situation of development, and for this reason does not provide an
> adequate explanation of the CAUSES of the crisis (which in my view are not
> caused by the environment directly. Even my own critique of Andy's
> interpretation at the time underemphasized the intrinsic side of
> neoformations; it falls into the kinds of developmental schemata that
> Vygotsky calls "eclectic" here (I used a basket of verbal, mental, and
> material processes without bothering to find some intrinsic link between
> them).
>
> c) There are also issues which Vygotsky himself does not appear to resolve,
> for example, the nature of CRITICAL neoformations. These cannot be entirely
> negative--that is, "neo-disformations", because they do not entirely
> disappear in the subsequent age. But what are they?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
> PS, for those who are not sticking to the one screen rule: I think that
> when Vygotsky criticizes "bourgeois psychologists", he is simply using his
> usual tactic of naming a distant target in order to avoid naming names
> close to home (this is why he is so very eloquent on the subject of Watson
> and Thorndike and has so little to say against Pavlov and Bekhterev).
>
> On the one hand, Mike is right when he says that Western psychologists, and
> in particular pedologists, were all talking about the crises. In fact a lot
> of this chapter  consists of polemics against their periodizations of the
> crisis: Binet's, Stratz's, Stern's, Buhler's and Busemann's.
>
> Here's an abstract of the Busemann paper that Vygotsky critiques:
>
> Die Erregungsphasen der Jugend. / The excitation phases of youth.
>
> Busemann, A.
>
> Zeitschrift für Kinderforschung, Vol 33, 1927, 115-137.
>
> Abstract
>
> The author takes as his text the thesis of Siegert (Die Periodizität in der
> Entwicklung der Kindesnatur, 1891) that children develop not according to a
> smooth upward curve of physical and mental progress, but rather by an
> irregular course of "favorable and unfavorable phases," so that the
> impression of periodicity is given. In a careful review of recent European
> work, including a few of the older studies in English, the author finds
> striking evidence of critical phases in the development of children. Among
> the experimental studies reported are Busemann's own contributions in the
> field of early speech development and of moral judgments. The article
> serves as an historical background and field of enlargement to them. The
> critical phases or periods of excitation the writer places roughly at ages
> 3, 6, 9, 12 or 13, 16 or 17, and perhaps at 19 or 20. The Binet tests do
> not show the variations in response at the critical ages as do some other
> intelligence tests, probably, the author believes, because they are
> constructed in such a way as to take account of these variations in rate of
> psychological development. Country children reach the successive excitation
> crises somewhat later than city children. A theory of physiological and
> psychological phase and counterphase is advanced in explanation of the
> developmental rhythm: the progress of development proceeds until in the
> emotional-subjective sphere a supernormal phase occurs. The passing of a
> certain high point in this sphere then releases or stimulates a
> compensatory development in the intentional-objective sphere. The apparent
> correlation between the appearance of the excitation phases and rapidity in
> anatomical growth lends evidence in favor of a structural basis for the
> observed behavior phenomena. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all
> rights reserved).
>
>
> On the other, there were a lot of SOVIET pedologists who did not believe in
> the crisis (including Vygotsky's friend Blonsky, and, as we've seen,
> Leontiev). Actually, they are still at it. Look at this:
>
>  “...(G)iving more freedom to adolescents in making their own choices over
> minor issues could substantially reduce the frequency of their conflicts
> with parents. Even when dealing with more serious issues, a parent saying
> ‘I’m older than you and your elder, so do what i say’ does not seem to be
> an effective strategy (Larson & Richards, 1994, p. 140). Rather than that,
> to both reach an acceptable solution and avoid excessive conflicts with
> adolescents, parents should reason with them on disputable issues, which is
> now possible because of their children’s new formal-logical abilities
> (Larson & Richards, 1994). On the basis of the discussion above, it would
> be reasonable to suggest that conflicts between adolescents and their
> parents are heavily determined by parent-adolescent styles of interaction;
> that is, they are anything but inevitable.” (pp. 226-227)
>
>
>
> Karpov, Y.V. (2005). The Neo-Vygotskyan Approach to Child Development.
> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
>
> dk
>
> On 21 March 2015 at 04:41, David H Kirshner <dkirsh@lsu.edu> wrote:
>
>   
>> Andy, you're slurring your spelling.
>> David
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
>> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
>> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2015 9:50 PM
>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Crises and stages/ages
>>
>> Oops! "Peter Principle" not "Peer Principle"
>>
>>
>>
>>     
>
>