Dilemmas Into Aporias

Transforming Dilemmas into Aporias

(Foreword to "The Foundations of Pedology: Growth and Differentiation",
Volume Six of the Korean language Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky)

Suppose we ask a child to stand still in the kitchen doorway every month
and mark the door jamb with a pencil line that matches the crown of the
child's head. There are growth spurts here and there, but we might assume
that on the whole the child's development is a slow process of
incrementally adding height. Now suppose we ask the child to stand still
and take a digital photograph every week. We can now create a kind of time-
lapse video of their development, and from this we can readily discern that
different parts of the child's body and even different parts of the child's
face are growing at different rates. But we might still assume that
development is rather like growth found in nature.

Now suppose, as Vygotsky suggests at the beginning of the sixth lecture in
this book, we allow the child to move and try to trace the development of
his or her ability to touch and point, play and work, understand and speak,
and eventually master his or her own sexuality, or her or his conceptual
thinking. Our measuring task is now not so straightforward. First of all,
we cannot simply record the child's appearance anymore; we are actually
more interested in the child's potential than we are in observing what
appears at any given moment. Secondly, all of these functions require not
only growth but motion. And there is more. The child's mobility is at one
and the same time the result of physiological development and psychological
development, and that psychological development is itself the result of
enculturation.

Such is the task of understanding and analysis that Vygotsky sets before
his students and himself in this collection of lectures. At first glance,
the gap between the students' understanding and Vygotsky's analysis appears
unbridgeable. On the one hand, Vygotsky' students are beginners; teachers
who have come from all over the USSR to do a short course before returning
to difficult classroom conditions of the most varied kind. They are
overwhelmingly interested in practical problems. On the other, Vygotsky is
in the very last year of his short career, only months from his own death,
but nevertheless at the peak of his unparalleled powers as a methodologist,
a theoretician, a thinker, a writer, and a teacher.

But Vygotsky teaches us, near the end of Lecture Four, that this kind of
unsurmountable gap is actually a characteristic feature of ontogenesis.
Unlike, say, phylogenesis, or even sociogenesis, we find that when
individuals develop, they do so face to face with more complete forms. This
is true of the child and the mother, the student and the teacher, and even
the reader and the author. So it is that Vygotsky and his students prevail,
not just in spite of the gap between them but largely because of it. Faced
with a huge gap between himself and his students, Vygotsky distinguishes
ruthlessly between the merely important and the absolutely essential. In
these lectures, he focuses almost exclusively on the latter, with almost
none of the intense involvement in disputes with other scientists that mark
his works like "생각과 말", "도구와 기호", "역사와 발달", and even "상상과
창조". Instead, Vygotsky states his "foundations of pedology" in the form
of "laws", places the most important points in bold for his students, and
then writes them on the blackboard to be copied into notebooks. He offers
copious and simple examples, and asks many rhetorical questions, sometimes
answering them himself.

However, even if Vygotsky does succeed in conveying his ideas to his
students, it seems unlikely that the ideas will ever be conveyed onwards
from them. Vygotsky's students will never be granted graduating
certificates, for the discipline they are studying, pedology, is already
under heavy criticism by the Soviet authorities and within a few months it
will be wiped from the curriculum altogether. Internationally, the
situation is not much better. Vygotsky is isolated; he has broken away,
first from an idealist psychology based on introspection and phenomenology,
then from a vulgarly materialist one based on experimental observations of
behavior, and then from a Freudian influenced child psychology in the
process of being founded by Jean Piaget. To the extent he has any co-
thinkers anywhere in the world, they are the German Gestalt
psychologists—but he has important differences with these too (particularly
over the role of speech and the semiotic structure of the human mind). In
Germany, his colleagues and friends are being arrested by the Nazis or
forced into exile

Once again it is the very hardships that ensure the survival of these texts
and that bring them back to our attention today. For reasons that are still
not entirely clear, the lectures are stenographed and recorded in the
school archives. Mimeographed versions are handed out to the students. One
of these mimeographed sets of lectures is then taken back to the remote
independent republic of Udmurtia by a student, Serapion Alekseevich
Korotayev, where it survives the war and the many catastrophes suffered by
less remote areas of Russia and was discovered upon his death by his
daughter, Galina Serapionovna Korotaeva. After some struggle, it is
published by the German philology department of the University of Udmurtia
in 2001, and it is from this publication that we have taken this
translation.

In these lectures, Vygotsky is preoccupied not with theoretical disputes
nor with contemporary discoveries now far in the past. He wants to impart
to his students, and through them to us, a particular scientific method.
Sure enough, it is this method rather than the difficult circumstances in
which the lectures were given which make them still important reading for
teachers today. Pedology as a method is holistic but analytic, experimental
but clinical, and comparative but genetic. We might add: Vygotsky's method
is analytic because it is holistic, clinical because it is experimental,
and genetic because it is comparative. Each of these points is presented in
these lectures as a kind of "aporia", that is, a rhetorical doubt raised
for the purpose of imparting not only the certainty of facts but also the
means by which we arrive at them.

The first aporia is that development is, on the one hand, development of
the whole, and it is truer to say that the healthy development of, say, the
child's neurological system or the child's endocrine system depends on the
child's overall safety, health, and welfare than the other way round. On
the other hand, since there is no general law that can cover development as
a whole, we are forced to search for particular laws that have highly
specific explanatory powers. For this reason the reader will find that the
chapters come in pendants, almost like Chinese couplets. But—just like
Chinese couplets—the reader may find that the chapters refer to each other,
and indeed the second is often derived, by a process of differentiation,
from the first.

Lecture One: The Problem and the Approach (to be addressed by the
pedological method)
Lecture Two: The Method (which emerges from the Problem and the Approach)

Lecture Three: Heredity (differentiated from the environment by pedological
methods)
Lecture Four: The Environment (to be interacted with, influenced and
mastered by the child)

Lecture Five: Psychological Development (which emerges from the hereditary
endowment)
Lectures Six and Seven: Physiological Development (the endocrine system and
its interaction with the nervous system and thus with psychological
development)

First there is, as with almost all of Vygotsky's major works, an
introduction which broaches the problem and the approach, followed by a
differentiated lecture on method (which references the problem and the
approach throughout.). Then there is a chapter on heredity and the
environment, followed by a differentiated lecture on the environment (which
references the problem of the child's own contribution to the environment).
Then there are is a chapter on psychological development, followed by a
lecture on the physiological development of the endocrine system which
refers repeatedly to the nervous system---and, to complete the circle, a
lecture on the development of the nervous system, which refers firmly us
back to the chapter on psychological development, and to the concept of
development as a whole. In this way, we see that the concept of development
in pedology is not simply holistic but analytic: it is holistic precisely
by being analytic.

The second aporia is that, on the one hand, development appears to be, in
the final analysis, not only concrete but unique in every single case; as
Lecture Three demonstrates, not even monozygotic twins develop exactly
alike. On the other hand, because there is so much variation in
development, individual cases, particularly when they are abnormal in some
way, seem to tell us very little of what we want to know about children in
general. For the former reason, Vygotsky uses individual pathological cases
as a kind of naturally occurring experiment, to show what could happen when
certain preconditions of development are impaired at different stages of
development. For the latter, while Vygotsky firmly rejects the Pearson
principle which is the main support of psychometric testing in schools
today, he does embrace the idea of mass studies comparing monozygotic twins
with dizygotic ones—precisely in order to prove the non-heritability of the
kinds of higher, complex functions we today call intelligence. At the same
time, he recognizes clearly that even these mass studies, while they can
tell us a good deal about the nature of the traits we have isolated for
study, give us only a static view of the relationship between heritable and
environmental traits. What the studies reveal is that development itself
must develop: the balance of dependence on heritability and dependence on
the environment in the development of the complex functions which really
account for the bulk of the child's development changes along with the
trait itself.

The third aporia is that there appears to be some contradiction between
working comparatively and working genetically. On the one hand, a cross-
sectional comparison uses two different subjects who do not share heredity
or do not share environmental conditions. On the other, a genetic
comparison must take longitudinal measurements of one and the same subject
at different points in time, with the hereditary endowment and even, to a
large extent, the material environment held constant. Once again, Vygotsky
treats this as an aporia—a contradiction which is logical, but only in the
sense that it exists in abstract logic and not in real life. For if
pathology presents a naturally occurring experiment showing how development
varies in the presence or absence of a particular gland or a particular
function then development itself can present the same experiment. Just as
pathology shows how an organism develops without a particular system or
function, development itself demonstrates the difference before the system
or function arises and afterwards. Precisely because the hereditary and
environmental aspects of development are held relatively constant, we can,
by comparing a same individual to himself or herself at different moments
in time, understand development as a process of higher functions that
emerge, not from the sufficient environment or from adequate heredity, but
rather from the inadequacy of the lower functions as they face a highly
imperfect environment and have to change it.

As with other volumes in this series, we have provided boxes throughout the
text which offer two kinds of information: supplementary material in non-
italic type and attempts to explicate in italics; as always, the reader who
has no need of these aids is invited to skip them. At the end of each
chapter, there is also a kind of "executive summary", which tries to put
all of Vygotsky's main points into a digest for group study. Where material
has been inserted into the text itself, we show this by adding the letter (-
-K) in parentheses, to designate the Korean translators of this text, and
where the Russian editors have suggested emendations, we include these in
the boxes, unless they make no difference to the Korean translation.

Vygotsky ends his very first lecture by dividing theories of development
into three, and except for his last one, the three groups of theories sound
very familiar to us today. They are still the main theories used to
describe the development of the child in the kitchen doorway. The first
group are naturalistic ones, which claim that development is a natural
process whose potential inheres entirely in the child himself/herself. As
Halliday points out, this is the central assumption of "childism", on which
so much Disney literature for children and "discovery" learning methods are
based (2004: 251). The second group of theories Vygotsky discusses are
mechanistic ones, which claim, contrariwise, that development is a socially-
driven process of adaptation to environmental conditions.

Halliday points out, there isn't any necessary connection between this view
and associationist psychology, or, for that matter, between the
naturalistic view and a "language acquisition device" with certain hard-
wired hypotheses about language to be tested by the child (2004: 29). We
can very easily imagine an environmentalist form of teaching based on
discovery learning, and this is perhaps the dominant view of Piaget's work
today. We can easily imagine "childist" teaching based on stimulus-response
theory or shaping, and in fact that is perhaps the dominant "scaffolding"
view of Vygotsky's own zone of proximal development (for an excellent
critique of this interpretation of Vygotsky, see Chaiklin, 2003). Indeed,
the one group of theories that does not seem to have been much cross-
coupled with teaching techniques today is precisely the one that Vygotsky
lays out here—the theory that development necessarily involves on the one
hand, the creation of potential that was not inherent in the child at the
outset and on the other, exaptation rather than adaptation: the use of
organs, systems, and functions that were biologically given for purposes
that were not.

Speech development, Vygotsky's favorite example, provides instances of
both. On the one hand, by learning speech, the child creates a vast
potential for enculturation that was not at all present in the child at
birth. On the other, the learning of speech involves using organs, systems,
and functions given at birth for biological purposes (breathing and eating)
for socio-cultural purposes that were not. But studying speech development
in a child isn't something we can do by putting the child against the
kitchen doorway and marking height with a pencil, or even by using a
digital. Studying speech, and with it studying the overall psychological
and physiological development of the whole child, is something for which we
need a new method, a method Vygotsky calls "pedology".

Empirically, the "general laws" revealed by this method turn out to be
simply patterns which manifest themselves quite differently at different
moments of development. In their abstract, logical, theoretical
formulation, they turn out to be almost entirely negative: development is
not even, dependencies are not constant, and the system of functional
differentiation that obtains at the beginning of development is not the
same as that which exists at the end. Yet in chapter after chapter,
Vygotsky points out, there are indeed regularities—but they are
regularities which on the one hand divide the beginning of development from
the middle and the end, and on the other seem to unite heredity and the
environment, psychological and physical development, and even, within
physical development, the endocrine and nervous systems. These regularities
cut across rather than between the various aspects of development and the
varied disciplines that describe them; they unite age periods into complex
but coherent systems. They are not acts of God or even rational principles
that inhere in nature, but more like historical laws...and, because human
beings can exercise some control over their environment and through the
environment over themselves, these historical laws ultimately can be
brought under human control.

In July of 2014, as we were translating this book, the psychologist Ernst
Boesch died. Boesch was the generation after Piaget and Vygotsky; he almost
took Piaget's place at the Maison des Petits of the Institut Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in Geneva, but instead accepted work as a school psychologist in
Germany, working with Barbel Inhelder, who would later co-author many of
Piaget's most important works (e.g. Piaget and Inhelder, 1969, 1973).
Taking up Vygotsky's own remark that psychology is a science which attempts
to address a non-natural subject with the methods of the natural sciences,
Boesch wrote "It is the dilemma of psychology to approach with a natural
science an object that creates history (1971)." This dilemma is not just
the dilemma of the psychologist; it's the dilemma of every working teacher,
and even of each caring parent, for in growing up the child creates far
more history than just the pencil marks on the kitchen door jamb. But with
this book, we have a method for transforming that dilemma into a set of
aporias that enlightens instead of baffling, sharpening our foresight but
still heightening our sense of wonder.

References:

비고츠키, L.S. (2011). 생각과 말. 서울: 살림터.
비고츠키, L.S. (2012). 도구와 기호. 서울: 살림터.
비고츠키, L.S. (2013). 역사와 발달 I서울: 살림터.
비고츠키, L.S. (2014). 역사와 발달 II. 서울: 살림터.
비고츠키, L.S. (2014). 상상과 창조. 서울: 살림터.

Выготский Л.С. (2001). Лекции по педологии. Ижевск: Издательский дом
"Удмуртский
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Boesch, E.E. (1971). Zwischen zwei Wirklichkeiten. Prolegomena zu einer
ökologischen Psychologie. Bern: Huber.

Chaiklin, S. (2003). The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky's
Analysis of Learning and Instruction. In Kozulin, A, Gindis, B., Ageyev,
V.S. and Miller, S.M. (Ed.) Vygotsky's Educational Theory in Cultural
Context. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 39-64.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2004). The Language of Early Childhood. London:
Continuum.

Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B. (1969/2000). The Psychology of the Child. New
York: Basic Books.

Piaget J. and Inhelder, B. (1973). Memory and Intelligence. New York: Basic
Books.