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

[David Kellogg]

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
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