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Mike:
I understood your question as this: Why does Vygotsky dismiss bike riding (typing, playing golf, estimating the lengths of line segments and the size of angles) as developmentally inert and then turn around and embrace the transition from crawling to walking as the "first moment" in the developmental crisis at one?
My answer was that the means of development itself develops. from material activity to verbal activity to thinking. Similarly, the child invests in activity first, and only later in speech and then much later in thinking. When Vygotsky says that the stone that was rejected by the builders shall become the cornerstone, or perhaps the keystone of the Gothic arch, what he means is that, functionally speaking, the last shall be first. But that means, of course, that the first shall be last. The FLN in Algeria began by investing heavily in natural gas and steel; only later did they try to promote tourism and consumer goods (by the time I went to live there in 1982 the massive steel plant at Al Haddjar was in decline, but Kabylie was actually producing extremely palatable Sangre de Toro!).
I don't think the clear distinction Vygotsky makes between learning and development is original to Vygotsky; I think, if anything, he owes the way he formulates it to Koffka's 1924 book, "The Growth of the Mind". But I do think Vygotsky made the distinction omni-relevant (so for example he would utterly reject the title "Growth of the Mind" as conflating learning with development). That's why, even within the developmental process, we can distinguish between lines of development which are central (i.e. which are harbingers of the next zone of development) and those which are peripheral (which are linked to zones of development past).
We can even apply the distinction within the central line of development. Consider speech after age one, which is an indubitable central line of development. I would say that at the beginning of the period of early childhood (say, age one) vocabulary acquisition has a leading role. But by the end, the number of words the child is learning is not nearly as important as syntax. That's why vocabulary learning looks linear, but syntactic acquisition is anything but.
David Kellogg Hankuk University of Foreign Studies --------- 원본 메일 ---------
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