According to Vygotsky, education has to be conceived as a process that takes into account the way human beings evolve in the world, which doesn’t happen constantly, but is a process that has its ups and downs, and which provides for the child a root in the culture within which he or she develops. These steps, sometimes taken ahead, sometimes backwards, are nothing but the struggle of learning, that allows the child to think, make contact with reality, which triggers a continuous intellectual flow. Therefore, the development is a continuous journey to and fro, a permanent change in the structures of thinking, and adapt to the problems that need to be solved. As Vygotsky says, this is exactly the type of learning that can provoke the internal processes of development, which wouldn’t happen if the individual didn’t come in contact with a certain social and cultural environment.
When this process is modified through the action of the cultural environment, the structures of thought suffer a crucial transformation, which, as a result, allows the child to think in a more efficient manner and also prepare and adapt him in a more profound way to the cultural environment to which he belongs. Therefore, if the development of the cultural behavior doesn’t follow a constant ascending trend, the educational processes should take all this into account.
Another important aspect when in the educational approach of Vygotsky is not only the meaning of evolution, but also the concept of fight and struggle, i.e., understanding that the contradiction and the shock between natural and historical, between primitive and cultural, between organic and social, is part of the drama of the educational process.
Vygotsky also studied the education of handicapped children and stated that all the cultural environment is designed for normal people. However, when a child has a certain abnormality, the concordance between the natural and the natural and cultural lines of development that people usually perceive, becomes chaos and dissociation for the sick child. In order to solve this problem, education has to create certain artificial cultural techniques, consisting in different ways or special methods of representing symbols and signs, adapted to the particular psychological and physiological characteristics of the handicapped child.
No Comment