The surge of contemporary interest in Vygotsky's contribution to child psychology has focused largely on his developmental method and his claim that higher psychological functions in the individual emerge out of social processes, that is, his notion of the "zone of proximal development." Insufficient attention has been given to his claim that human social and psychological processes are shaped by cultural tools or mediational means. This book is one of the most important documents for understanding this claim. Making a timely appearance, this volume speaks directly to the present crisis in education and the nature/nurture debate in psychology. It provides a greater understanding of an interdisciplinarian approach to the education of normal and exceptional children, the role of literacy in psychological development, the historical and cultural evolution of behavior, and other important issues in cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and cultural and social anthropology.

The surge of contemporary interest in Vygotsky's contribution to child psychology has focused largely on his developmental method and his claim that higher psychological functions in the individual emerge out of social processes, that is, his notion of the "zone of proximal development." Insufficient attention has been given to his claim that human social and psychological processes are shaped by cultural tools or mediational means. This book is one of the most important documents for understanding this claim.
Making a timely appearance, this volume speaks directly to the present crisis in education and the nature/nurture debate in psychology. It provides a greater understanding of an interdisciplinarian approach to the education of normal and exceptional children, the role of literacy in psychological development, the historical and cultural evolution of behavior, and other important issues in cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and cultural and social anthropology.

When this classic book was first published in 1926, L.S. Vygotsky was well on his way to becoming one of the leading intellectuals in Russia. His study of the psychology of education led him to believe that the child should be the main figure in the educational process - and the efforts of the teacher should be directed toward organizing, not dictating, the child's development. "The educational process must be based on the student's individual activity ..." he states in Educational Psychology, "... and the art of education should involve nothing more than guiding and monitoring this activity." At a time when most education consisted of rote memorization and thwacks across the wrist with a ruler, these ideas were considered quite radical.
Today's educators can find much that is of use in the pages of Educational Psychology. Vygotsky addresses many issues that are still relevant in the 1990s - abnormal social behavior, the nurturing of creativity and reasoning, problems with attention and memory - in a bold and opinionated fashion that is sure to delight educators as well as lovers of classical Russian writing. Psychologists will also find the book useful for its fascinating glimpses into the study of psychology in the early twentieth century.

vi the text can engender. Of course, translations by scholars of advanced standing are not a novelty in modern scholarship. The Plenum translations ofVygotsky' s texts are appearing at a moment when authentic and authoritative English versions of them are rare-a moment when the frequency of works about Vygotsky threatens to outstrip the availability of work by Vygotsky. Since seminal thinkers make their contributions by provoking further thought, admirers ofVygotsky will, of course, welcome the spate of interpretation, reinterpretation, revision, reconstruction, and deconstruction which Vygotsky's work has invited and will participate with alacrity in the activity. Yet, the translations appearing in these volumes are not offered as interpretations in the sense that they are new analytic works about Vygotsky. They are offered to serve as basic texts for readers of English who may be interested in what Vygotsky himself had to say. They are offered to scholars and students, who will make their own interpretations (in its broader sense) and who will evaluate the interpretations of others. Having taken the view that a good translation is essentially an interpretation, the claim that this volume is an accurate and authentic interpretation of Vygotsky's meanings and intentions-and only of those meanings and intentions-must await hoped-for reassurances from those reviewers and critics who are qualified to make such judgments.

Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and one of the most influential psychologists in the world during the 20th century. This volume, the first of six, examines Vygotsky's works involving problems of general psychology, including thinking and speech.

Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and one of the most influential psychologists in the world during the 20th century. This volume, the last of six, examines Vygotsky's scientific archives and legacy.

Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and one of the most influential psychologists in the world during the 20th century. This volume, the first of six, examines Vygotsky's works involving problems of general psychology, including thinking and speech.

This book is the second volume in a series presenting new English translations of L.S. Vygotsky's writings on the holistic science of the child he called "pedology". It presents unique materials which reflect the development of Vygotsky's theoretical position at the last stage of his creative evolution in 1932-1934 and contributes to the number of original Vygotsky texts available in English. It includes the problem of age and age periodization; the structure and dynamics of age, psychological characteristics of age crises and diagnostics of development in relation to age, and the zone of proximal development, which became his most widely known but least understood theoretical innovation. This book places that concept in its context and makes it fully understandable for the first time. In addition, there are lectures and notes that Vygotsky made in preparation for lectures on six critical periods: birth, one year old, three, seven, and thirteen. Vygotsky also devotes chapters to the stable periods of infancy and early childhood and two whole chapters to school age. Future volumes in this series will explore Vygotsky's pedology of the adolescent.

Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist and one of the most influential psychologists in the world during the 20th century. This volume, the last of six, examines Vygotsky's scientific archives and legacy.

This book contains the first complete translation of the first half of the Pedology of the Adolescent by the Soviet thinker, educator, and teacher L.S. Vygotsky. It was the longest work published in his lifetime and was a correspondence course written by Vygotsky for teachers across the Soviet Union. The book is a sustained argument about the borders of pedology, the nature of the transition between childhood and adulthood, and the concrete character of the distinction between the lower psychological functions that we largely share with animals and those that are specific to fully socialized humans. After an initial methodological introduction, three kinds of maturation-general anatomical, sexual, and sociocultural-are explored. This book will be followed by a companion volume covering pedology of the transitional age as a psychological and social problem.

This book provides both a lost last word and a firm first foundation: seven lectures, given in the last months in the life of the Soviet thinker, teacher, and writer L.S. Vygotsky, offer us the most comprehensive and developed form of his thoughts on the child, expressed in the most fundamental and even popular form that Vygotsky himself used with his beginner-level students. As the title of Vygotsky's course indicates, these are foundations upon which cultural-historical researchers can rebuild the lost science of "pedology", a holistic approach to child development based on the dynamic unity of physical and mental development. Volume One includes translations of seven of Vygotsky's lectures that reflect his approach to pedology; the method of pedology and the "methodics" of the unit of analysis; the role of heredity and social environment in child development; and general laws of development in childhood that will help parents and teachers understand the way the child's endocrine system, nervous system, and mind change as the child enters a culture and learns to make history.

The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. "Mind in Society" should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky's important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English.

The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In "Mind in Society" Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky's relevance to modem psychological thought.

vi the text can engender. Of course, translations by scholars of advanced standing are not a novelty in modern scholarship. The Plenum translations ofVygotsky' s texts are appearing at a moment when authentic and authoritative English versions of them are rare-a moment when the frequency of works about Vygotsky threatens to outstrip the availability of work by Vygotsky. Since seminal thinkers make their contributions by provoking further thought, admirers ofVygotsky will, of course, welcome the spate of interpretation, reinterpretation, revision, reconstruction, and deconstruction which Vygotsky's work has invited and will participate with alacrity in the activity. Yet, the translations appearing in these volumes are not offered as interpretations in the sense that they are new analytic works about Vygotsky. They are offered to serve as basic texts for readers of English who may be interested in what Vygotsky himself had to say. They are offered to scholars and students, who will make their own interpretations (in its broader sense) and who will evaluate the interpretations of others. Having taken the view that a good translation is essentially an interpretation, the claim that this volume is an accurate and authentic interpretation of Vygotsky's meanings and intentions-and only of those meanings and intentions-must await hoped-for reassurances from those reviewers and critics who are qualified to make such judgments.

Presents a theoretical work originally written in the 1920s, long believed to be lost, by a Soviet psychologist. He responds to the proliferation of different schools within the field with the formulation of a unified theory based on Marxism. For scholars in psychology and the history of psychology.