MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE
FGAOU VPO "Southern Federal University"
PEDAGOGICAL INSTITUTE
Faculty of Pedagogy and Practical Psychology
Department of Practical Psychology
Department of Social Pedagogy and Youth Policy
ESSAY
in the discipline "General foundations of pedagogy"
on the topic "cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky"
Executor:
1st year student of OZO
Faculty of Pedagogy and Practical
psychology department of practical
psychology
Usoltsev Alexander Viktorovich
Checked:
Molokhina Galina Anatolievna
Rostov-on-Don
1. Introduction
2. The main provisions of the cultural = historical concept
L. S. Vygotsky
3. Conclusion
4. References
Introduction
Vygotsky Lev Semenovich (1896 - 1934), Soviet psychologist, developed a cultural-historical theory in psychology. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University (1917) and at the same time the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University. Shanyavsky. From 1924 he worked at the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology, then at the Institute of Defectology founded by him; later he gave lecture courses at a number of universities in Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov. Professor at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow.
The formation of L. S. Vygotsky as a scientist coincided with the period of restructuring of Soviet psychology based on the methodology of Marxism, in which he took an active part. In search of methods for an objective study of complex forms of mental activity and personality behavior, L. S. Vygotsky subjected to critical analysis a number of philosophical and most of his contemporary psychological concepts ("The Meaning of the Psychological Crisis", manuscript, 1926), showing the futility of attempts to explain human behavior by reducing the highest forms behavior towards the lower elements.
The main provisions of the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky
As a student of L. S. Vygotsky’s school, A. N. Leontiev, wrote, the “alpha and omega” of L. S. Vygotsky’s scientific creativity was the problem of consciousness, which he discovered for concrete scientific study. Traditional psychological science, calling itself the "psychology of consciousness", never was it, since consciousness acted in it as the subject of "direct" (introspective) experience, and not scientific knowledge.
In psychology, there were two points of view on the process of a child's mental development - one point of view - the study of higher mental functions from the side of their constituent natural processes, the reduction of higher and complex processes to elementary ones, without considering the specific features and patterns of cultural development of behavior. From the standpoint of the ideal approach, a person has a divine origin, the soul of a person, his psyche, is divine, immeasurable, and cannot be known. As L.S. Vygotsky - " only in the process of long-term research, spanning decades, did psychology manage to overcome the initial ideas that the processes of mental development are built and proceed according to a botanical model ».
Child psychology believed that the development of the child, in essence, is only a more complex and developed version of the emergence and evolution of those forms of behavior that we already observe in the animal world. Subsequently, the biological direction in child psychology was replaced by a zoological approach, most of the directions were looking for an answer to the question of child development in experiments on animals. These experiments, with minor changes, were transferred to children, and it is not for nothing that one of the most authoritative researchers in this field is forced to admit that the most important methodological successes in the study of the child are due to the zoopsychological experiment.
Scientific knowledge is always indirect, wrote L. S. Vygotsky, and “direct experience”, for example, of the feeling of love does not at all mean scientific knowledge of this complex feeling. To illustrate the difference between experience and proper scientific knowledge, L. S. Vygotsky liked to quote the words of F. Engels: “ We will never know in what form chemical rays are perceived by ants. Whoever it upsets, there's nothing you can do to help. ».
Citing these words in the context of a critical analysis of introspective psychology, L. S. Vygotsky wrote about this latter: “ Psychology has long strove not for knowledge, but for experience; in this example, she wanted to share with the ants their visual experience of feeling chemical rays rather than to scientifically know their vision.". At the same time, the so-called objective psychology (in particular, behaviorism), refusing to study consciousness, retained the fundamentally same (introspective) understanding of it.
Consciousness (and the psyche in general) appeared in the concept of L. S. Vygotsky not as a closed world of phenomena, open only to self-observation of the subject (as a “direct reality”), but as a thing of a fundamentally different (“essential”) order. If the phenomenon and the essence coincided, L. S. Vygotsky reminded the well-known position of K. Marx, no science would be needed. Consciousness requires the same objective scientific mediated study as any other entity, and is not reduced to a phenomenon (experience) introspectively given to us by the subject of any of its contents.
L. S. Vygotsky defined the psyche as an active and biased form of reflection by the subject of the world, a kind of “ the organ of selection, the sieve that filters the world and changes it so that action can be taken". He repeatedly emphasized that psychic reflection is distinguished by a non-mirror character: a mirror reflects the world more accurately, more fully, but psychic reflection is more adequate for the subject's lifestyle - the psyche is a subjective distortion of reality in favor of the organism. The features of mental reflection should therefore be explained by the way of life of the subject in his world.
L.S. Vygotsky sought to reveal, first of all, the specifically human in the child's behavior and the history of the formation of this behavior; his theory required a change in the traditional approach to the process of the child's mental development. In his opinion, the one-sidedness and fallacy of the traditional view of the facts of the development of higher mental functions lies in " in the inability to look at these facts as facts of historical development, in one-sided consideration of them as natural processes and formations, in the confusion and indistinguishability of natural and cultural, natural and historical, biological and social in the child’s mental development, in short, in an incorrect fundamental understanding of the nature of the studied phenomena ».
L. S. Vygotsky showed that a person has a special kind of mental functions that are completely absent in animals. These functions, named by L. S. Vygotsky higher mental functions, constitute the highest level of the human psyche, generally called consciousness. And they are formed in the course of social interactions. The higher mental functions of a person, or consciousness, are of a social nature. In order to clearly define the problem, the author brings together three fundamental concepts that were previously considered as separate - the concept of higher mental function, the concept of cultural development of behavior and the concept of mastering the processes of one's own behavior.
In accordance with this, the properties of consciousness (as a specifically human form of the psyche) should be explained by the peculiarities of a person's lifestyle in his human world. The system-forming factor of this life is, first of all, labor activity, mediated by tools of various kinds.
The hypothesis of L. S. Vygotsky was that mental processes are transformed in a person in the same way as the processes of his practical activity, i.e. they also become mediated. But the tools themselves, being non-psychological things, cannot, according to L. S. Vygotsky, mediate mental processes. Consequently, there must be special "psychological tools" - "tools of spiritual production." These psychological tools are various sign systems - language, mathematical signs, mnemonic techniques, etc.
Following the idea of the socio-historical nature of the psyche, Vygotsky makes the transition to the interpretation of the social environment not as a "factor", but as a "source" of personality development. In the development of the child, he notes, there are, as it were, two intertwined lines. The first follows the path of natural maturation. The second consists in mastering cultures, ways of behaving and thinking. Auxiliary means of organizing behavior and thinking that mankind has created in the process of its historical development are systems of signs-symbols (for example, language, writing, number system, etc.)
The sign is a tool developed by mankind in the processes of communication between people. It is a means (instrument) of influence, on the one hand, on another person, and on the other hand, on oneself. For example, an adult, tying a knot to his child for memory, thereby influences the child’s memorization process, making it mediated (the knot as a stimulus-means determines the memorization of stimuli-objects), and subsequently the child, using the same mnemonic technique, masters his own a process of memorization which, precisely through mediation, becomes voluntary.
The child's mastery of the relationship between sign and meaning, the use of speech in the use of tools marks the emergence of new psychological functions, systems underlying higher mental processes that fundamentally distinguish human behavior from animal behavior.
In the school of L. S. Vygotsky, the study of the sign began precisely with the study of its instrumental function. Subsequently, L. S. Vygotsky will turn to the study of the inner side of the sign (its meaning).
The original form of a sign's existence is always external. Then the sign turns into an internal means of organizing mental processes, which arises as a result of a complex step-by-step process of “growing” (interiorization) of the sign. Strictly speaking, it is not only and not so much the sign that is growing, but the whole system of operations of mediation. At the same time, it also means growing relationships between people. L. S. Vygotsky argued that if earlier the order (for example, to remember something) and the execution (memorization itself) were divided between two people, now both actions were performed by the same person.
According to L. S. Vygotsky, it is necessary to distinguish two lines of a child's mental development - natural and cultural development. The natural (initial) mental functions of an individual are direct and involuntary in nature, conditioned primarily by biological, or natural (later at the school of A. N. Leontiev they began to say - organic), factors (organic maturation and functioning of the brain). In the process of mastering the systems of signs by the subject (the line of "cultural development"), natural mental functions are transformed into new ones. - higher mental functions (HMF ) , which are characterized by three main properties:
1) sociality (by origin),
2) mediation (by structure),
3) arbitrariness (according to the nature of regulation).
Nevertheless, the natural development continues, but "in a filmed form", i.e. within and under the control of the cultural.
In the process of cultural development, not only separate functions change - new systems of higher mental functions arise, qualitatively different from each other at different stages of ontogenesis. Thus, as the child develops, the perception of the child is freed from its initial dependence on the affective-need sphere of a person and begins to enter into close ties with memory, and subsequently with thinking. Thus, the primary connections between functions that have developed in the course of evolution are replaced by secondary connections built artificially - as a result of man's mastery of sign means, including language as the main sign system.
The most important principle of psychology, according to L.S. Vygotsky, is the principle of historicism, or the principle of development (it is impossible to understand the “become” psychological functions without tracing the history of their development in detail), and the main method of studying higher mental functions is the method of their formation.
These ideas of L.S. Vygotsky found their empirical development in many experimental studies of representatives of the school he created.
To test the main provisions of the cultural-historical theory, L. S. Vygotsky and his collaborators developed a “double stimulation technique”, with the help of which the process of sign mediation was modeled, the mechanism of “rotation” of signs into the structure of mental functions - attention, memory, thinking - was traced.
A particular consequence of the cultural-historical theory is the proposition, important for the theory of learning, about the "zone of proximal development" - the period of time in which the child's mental function is restructured under the influence of the internalization of the structure of sign-mediated activity joint with the adult.
Vygotsky directed the psychologist’s thought in the following direction: in order to implement the program of cultural-historical theory, it was necessary, firstly, to analyze and set the sequence of external social contents that a developing person learns or should learn, and secondly, to understand the operation of the internalization mechanism itself, in thirdly, to characterize the features of internal contents (mental processes and structures) and the logic of their “as if immanent” development, which, in fact, according to Vygotsky, is a fusion of cultural and biological.
conclusions
The emergence of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory symbolized a new round in the development of personality psychology, which gained real support in substantiating its social origin, proving the existence of primary affective-semantic formations of human consciousness before and outside of each developing individual in the ideal and material forms of culture into which a person comes after birth. .
Bibliographic list of references
1. Vygotsky L. S. Tool and sign in the development of the child. Collected works, volume 6 - M .: Pedagogy, 1984. Vygotsky L.S. Pedagogical psychology. - M., 1991.
2. Vygotsky L. S., Luriya A. R. Etudes on the history of behavior. - M.-L.: State Publishing House, 1998.
3. Vygotsky L.S. The history of the development of higher mental functions. Collected works, volume 3. - M .: Pedagogy, 1983.
4. Cultural-historical theory // Psychology. Dictionary. M., 1990/ under the general editorship of A.V. Petrovsky and M.G. Yaroshevsky.
5. Rubinstein S.P. Fundamentals of General Psychology. - St. Petersburg ed. "Peter" 2005.
Personality is not a purely psychological concept, and it is studied by all social sciences - philosophy, sociology, ethics, pedagogy, etc. Literature, music, and visual arts contribute to understanding the nature of personality. Personality plays a significant role in solving political, economic, scientific, cultural, technical problems, in general, in raising the level of human existence.
The category of personality occupies one of the central places in modern scientific research and in the public consciousness. Thanks to the category of personality, opportunities arise for a holistic approach, system analysis and synthesis of psychological functions, processes, states, and properties of a person.
In psychological science, there is no generally accepted definition of the nature of personality. The era of active scientific study of personality problems can be divided into two stages. The first covers the period from the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century. and approximately coincides with the period of formation of classical psychology. At this time, the fundamental provisions about the personality were formulated, the main directions for the study of the psychological characteristics of the personality were laid. The second stage of research into personality problems began in the second half of the 20th century.
The value and uniqueness of a personality do not exclude, but presuppose the presence of its special structure. L.S. Vygotsky noted: “It is customary to call a structure such integral formations that do not add up in total from individual parts, representing their aggregate, but themselves determine the fate and significance of each of their constituent parts.” Personality structure:
As integrity, it is an objective reality, embodying internal personal processes. In addition, the structure reflects the logic of these processes and is subordinate to them;
Arises as an embodiment of a function, as an organ of this function. Of course, the emergence of a structure, in turn, leads to a change in the functions themselves and is closely connected with the process of its formation: the structure is both the result of formation, its condition and a factor in the further development of the individual;
It is an integrity that includes all mental (conscious and unconscious) and non-psychic components of the personality. But it is not their simple sum, but represents a new special quality, a form of existence of the human psyche. This is a special orderliness, a new synthesis;
Is controversial regarding the stability factor. On the one hand, it is stable and constant (includes the same components, makes behavior predictable). But at the same time, the personality structure is fluid, variable, never fully completed.
In the cultural-historical theory, it is proved that the structure of a person's personality changes in the process of ontogenesis. An important and unresolved problem is the determination of individual meaningful components of the personality structure. In order to make this problem clear, let us cite L. S. Vygotsky's arguments about the search for meaningful units of analysis of the psyche as a whole. He draws a good analogy with the chemical analysis of matter. If a scientist is faced with the task of establishing the true underlying mechanisms and properties, for example, of a substance such as water, he can choose two ways of analysis.
Firstly, it is possible to dissect a water molecule (H2O) into hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms and lose integrity, since the individual elements that stand out in this case will not have any properties inherent in water (this is the so-called "element-by-element" analysis).
Secondly, if you try to combine analysis with the preservation of the properties, features and functions of integrity, you should not decompose the molecule into elements, but single out individual molecules as active "building blocks" (L.S. Vygotsky writes - "units") of analysis, which can already be investigated, and at the same time preserve in the most simplified, but also acutely contradictory, "universal" form, all the features of matter as a whole.
The main specificity of a person as an object of psychological analysis is not even in complexity, but in the fact that this is an object capable of its own, free actions (the attribute "activity"). That is, a person, acting as an object of study (or influence), simultaneously exists as a subject, which greatly complicates the problem of understanding its psychology, but only complicates, and does not make it hopeless.
The allocation of semantic units of psychological analysis is the leading principle of genetic psychology. The analysis shows that one unit cannot be singled out in personality.
There are structures of different psychological nature that satisfy the requirements for the unit of analysis:
The structure should be specific and independent, but at the same time - it will exist and develop only as part of a holistic personality;
This structure should reflect the whole personality in its real unity, but at the same time be reflected "in depth and simplified" in the form of an essential contradiction;
This structure is not something like a "building block" - it is dynamic and capable of both its own development and harmonious participation in the formation of a holistic personality;
The structure in question should reflect a certain essential perspective of the existence of the individual and meet all the essential features of a holistic personality.
Being a historical being, man is at the same time, and even above all, a natural being: he is an organism that bears in itself the specific features of human nature. It is essential for the psychological development of man that he is born with a human brain, that, when he is born, he brings with him the inheritance received from his ancestors, which opens up wide opportunities for human development. They are realized and, being realized, develop and change as a person masters in the course of training and education what was created as a result of the historical development of mankind - products of material and spiritual culture, science, art. The natural characteristics of man differ precisely in that they open up the possibilities of historical development.
L.S. Vygotsky believed that the first steps in the child's mental development are of great importance for the entire history of the child's personality. The biological development of behavior, especially intense after birth, is the most important subject of psychological study. The history of the development of higher mental functions is impossible without studying the prehistory of these functions, their biological roots, their organic inclinations. In infancy, the genetic roots of the two main cultural forms of behavior are laid - the use of tools and human speech; this circumstance alone places the age of the infant at the center of the prehistory of cultural development.
Cultural development is separated from history and is regarded as an independent process directed by internal forces inherent in it, subdued by its own immanent logic. Cultural development is seen as self-development. Hence the immovable, static, unconditional nature of all the laws governing the development of the child's thinking and worldview.
Children's animism and egocentrism, magical thinking based on participatory (the idea of the connection or identity of completely different phenomena) and artificialism (the idea of the creation of natural phenomena) and many other phenomena appear before us as some kind of always inherent in child development, mental forms are always the same. The child and the development of his mental functions are considered in abstracto - outside the social environment, the cultural environment and the forms of logical thinking that manage it, worldview and ideas about causality.
L.S. Vygotsky believed that in the process of his development, the child learns not only the content of cultural experience, but also the methods and forms of cultural behavior, cultural ways of thinking. In the development of the child's behavior, two main lines should be distinguished. One is the line of natural development of behavior, which is closely connected with the processes of general organic growth and maturation of the child. The second is the line of cultural improvement of psychological functions, the development of new ways of thinking, mastery of cultural means of behavior. It can be assumed that cultural development consists in the assimilation of such methods of behavior, which are based on the use and application of signs as means for the implementation of one or another psychological operation.
Cultural development lies precisely in the mastery of such auxiliary means of behavior that mankind has created in the process of its historical development and such as language, writing, and the counting system.
The cultural development of the child goes through four main stages, or phases, successively replacing each other and arising from one another. Taken as a whole, these stages represent the full circle of cultural development of any psychological function.
The first stage can be called the stage of primitive behavior or primitive psychology. In experiments, it manifests itself in the fact that a child, usually of an early age, tries, to the extent of his interest, to remember the material presented to him in a natural or primitive way. How much he remembers at the same time is determined by the degree of his attention, individual memory and interest.
Usually, such difficulties encountered along the way of the child lead him to the second stage, or the child himself "discovers" the mnemotechnical method of memorization, or the researcher comes to the aid of the child who cannot cope with the task with the forces of his natural memory. The researcher, for example, lays out pictures in front of the child and selects words for memorization so that they are in some kind of natural connection with the pictures. The child, listening to the word, looks at the drawing, and then easily restores the whole row in memory, since the drawings, in addition to his desire, remind him of the word he has just heard. The child usually very quickly grasps at the remedy to which he was led, but not knowing, of course, by what means the drawings helped him to remember the words. When a series of words is presented to him again, he again, this time on his own initiative, puts drawings around him, looks at them again, but since this time there is no connection, and the child does not know how to use the drawing in order to remember a given word, he looks at the drawing during reproduction, reproduces not the word that was given to him, but the one that reminds him of the drawing.
The second stage usually plays the role of a transitional one, from which the child very quickly passes in the experiment to the third stage, which can be called the stage of cultural external reception. Now the child replaces the processes of memorization with rather complex external activities. When he is given a word, he seeks out of the many cards in front of him the one that for him is most closely related to the given word. In this case, at first the child tries to use the natural connection that exists between the picture and the word, and then quite quickly proceeds to the creation and formation of new connections.
The third stage is replaced by the fourth stage, which directly arises from the third. With the help of the sign, the external activity of the child passes into internal activity. External reception becomes internal. For example, when a child must remember the words presented to him, using pictures laid out in a certain sequence. After several times, the child "memorizes" the drawings themselves, and he no longer needs to use them. Now he associates the conceived word with the name of that figure, the order of which he already knows.
Thus, within the framework of the theory of personality L.S. Vygotsky identifies three basic laws of personality development.
The first law concerns the development and construction of higher mental functions, which are the main core of the personality. This is the law of transition from direct, natural forms of behavior to indirect, artificial, arising in the process of cultural development of psychological functions. This period in ontogeny corresponds to the process of the historical development of human behavior, the improvement of existing forms and ways of thinking, and the development of new ones based on language or another system of signs.
The second law is formulated as follows: the relationship between higher psychological functions was once real relationships between people. Collective, social forms of behavior in the process of development become a means of individual adaptation, forms of behavior and thinking of the individual. Higher psychological functions arise from collective social forms of behavior.
The third law can be called the law of the transition of functions from the external to the internal plan. The psychological function in the process of its development passes from the external form to the internal, i.e. internalized, becomes an individual form of behavior. There are three stages in this process. Initially, any higher form of behavior is mastered by the child only from the outside. Objectively, it includes all the elements of a higher function, but for a child this function is a purely natural, natural means of behavior. However, people fill this natural form of behavior with a certain social content, which later acquires the significance of a higher function for the child. In the process of development, the child begins to realize the structure of this function, to manage and regulate his internal operations. Only when the function rises to its highest, third degree, does it become a proper function of the personality.
According to L.S. Vygotsky, the basis of personality is the self-consciousness of a person, which arises precisely during the transitional period of adolescence. Behavior becomes behavior for oneself, a person realizes himself as a certain unity. This moment represents the central point of the transitional age. Psychological processes in a teenager acquire a personal character. On the basis of self-awareness of the individual, mastery of psychological processes for himself, a teenager rises to the highest level of management of internal operations. He feels himself the source of his own movement, ascribes a personal character to his actions.
In the process of sociogenesis of higher psychological functions, the so-called tertiary functions are formed, based on a new type of connections and relationships between individual processes, for example, between memory and thinking, perception, attention and action. Functions enter into new complex relationships with each other.
In the mind of a teenager, these new types of connections and correlations of function provide for reflection, reflection of mental processes. Characteristic of psychological functions in adolescence is the participation of the individual in each individual act: it is not thinking that thinks - a person thinks, it is not the memory that remembers, but the person. Psychological functions enter into a new relationship with each other through personality. The law of construction of these higher tertiary functions is that they are psychic relations transferred into the personality, which were previously relations between people.
Thus, a personality is a socialized individual who embodies essential socially significant properties. A personality is a person who has his own life position, which has been established as a result of long and painstaking conscious work, it is characterized by free will, the ability to choose, and responsibility.
The doctrine of the development of higher mental functions in the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky
abstract
Coursework: 32p., 23 sources.
Keywords: higher mental functions, cultural-historical theory, interpsychic, intrapsychic, zone of actual development, zone of proximal development, sign, speech, thinking.
Object of study- cultural and historical concept of Vygotsky.
Subject of study- higher mental functions in the teachings of Vygotsky.
Objective: conducting an analysis of higher mental functions in the cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky.
Research methodsKeywords: analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, abstraction.
Hypothesis- the development of higher mental functions is due to cultural and historical conditions.
Introduction
Vygotsky Lev Semenovich - Soviet psychologist, developed a cultural-historical theory in psychology. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and at the same time the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the Shanyavsky University. He worked at the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology, then at the Institute of Defectology founded by him. Later he lectured at a number of universities in Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov. Professor at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow.
The cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky gave rise to the largest school in Soviet psychology, from which came A. N. Leontiev, A. R. Luria, P. Ya. Galperin, A. V. Zaporozhets, P. I. Zinchenko, D. B. Elkonin .
The bibliography of Vygotsky's works includes 191 works. Vygotsky's ideas received wide resonance in all sciences that study man, including linguistics, psychiatry, ethnography, and sociology. They determined a whole stage in the development of humanitarian knowledge and still retain their heuristic potential. He is the author of books on the problems of general, child, pedagogical and genetic psychology, pedology, defectology, psychopathology, psychiatry, the socio-historical nature of consciousness and the psychology of art.
The relevance of the topic of the course work lies in the importance of the question of the scientific features of cultural and historical theory and the features of higher mental functions, which are currently being studied by scientists from different countries.
The purpose of the work is to analyze the higher mental functions in the cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky.
To achieve this goal, the following tasks are set in the work:
) Analyze the features of the formation of the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky;
) Analyze the main provisions of the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky;
) Analyze the concept of higher mental functions in the teachings of Vygotsky;
) Analyze the features of the development of higher mental functions in the teachings of Vygotsky.
) Analyze the influence of Vygotsky's ideas on the modern development of psychology.
Object of study: Vygotsky's cultural-historical concept.
Subject of study: higher mental functions in the teachings of Vygotsky.
1. Cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky
1.1 Features of the formation of the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky
“It would not be an exaggeration to call Vygotsky a genius. For more than five decades in science, I have not met a person who would come close to him in terms of clarity of mind, the ability to see the essence of the most complex problems, the breadth of knowledge in many areas of science and the ability to foresee the further development of psychology.
In psychology before Vygotsky, there were two points of view on the process of an individual's mental development. One point of view considered the study of higher mental functions from the point of view of their natural processes, the reduction of higher to lower processes, without considering the specific features and patterns of cultural development. From the standpoint of the ideal approach, a person has a divine origin, the soul of a person, his psyche, is divine, immeasurable, and cannot be known. From the point of view of this approach, a person cannot be known, since what is created by God is not subject to study. As Vygotsky notes: “only in the process of long-term research, spanning decades, did psychology manage to overcome the initial ideas that the processes of mental development are built and proceed according to a botanical pattern.”
The position of the ideal approach or epistemological approach suggests that consciousness acts as the opposite of matter. Consciousness is understood as the ability of an ideal reflection of reality, the transformation of the objective content of an object into the subjective content of a person's mental life. It is in the subjective world of consciousness that reproduction of objective reality and mental preparation for transformative practical activity take place. Consciousness is a function of the human brain, the essence of which lies in an adequate, generalized, purposeful active reflection and constructive and creative alteration of the external world, a person separating himself from the world around him and opposing himself to him as a subject to an object. Consciousness is also an emotional assessment of reality, followed by setting goals for activity, taking into account the consequences. Therefore, consciousness is not a simple image, but an ideal form of activity, focused on the reflection and transformation of reality. The content of consciousness is determined by several factors:
) external objective and spiritual world. Phenomena are reflected in consciousness in the form of concrete sensory and conceptual images. There is nothing material in these images, only their reflection, copies that carry information about them;
) general concepts, social attitudes and ideals, norms, means and methods of cognition developed by the socio-cultural environment;
) the entire spiritual world of the individual, his own unique experience of life and experiences, that is, the subjective reality of an individual;
) conditioned reflex and biochemical organization of the brain, which also affects the state of consciousness.
In fact, all these factors are interconnected, while external sources are refracted through the inner world of a person. The conclusion is as follows: the source of individual consciousness is not the ideas themselves, not the brain itself, the source of consciousness is the reality reflected by a person through a highly organized material substrate - the brain and in the system of transpersonal forms of social consciousness. “The idea of the unity of the human body was justified both ontologically (it is a bunch of natural forces and elements inherent in the universe as a whole), and epistemologically (it is known in the same way as the rest of the realities of this universe). Accordingly, the psyche, as one of the life processes of this organism, is not an independent entity and does not require, in order to be known, other means than those by which science obtains the truth about other things.
Thus, within the framework of the epistemological approach, consciousness acts as an ideal, which is opposite to the material. The ideal is a special way of reproducing the general and value characteristics of objective reality through this reality, characteristic of the interaction of man and the world, subject and object. It cannot be reduced only to a material object, or to some scheme of actions with material objects, it cannot be reduced only to a subjective image of the objective world. It is born in a complex process of interaction between the subject and the object, all factors, sources of consciousness as a reflection, starting with material objects and ending in an intangible, subjective image that does not contain a single grain of the substance of reproduced reality.
From another point of view, which identified the lower and higher mental functions, there is no essential difference between the mental processes of man and animals. We are talking only about more complex forms of manifestation of these processes. “However, then a number of questions arose about the relationship between the higher and lower functions, which ensures the presence of such specific qualities of higher mental functions as their arbitrariness, awareness, etc. ... The answer to these questions in one way or another every major theory had to give a form. But some directions, such as association theory and behaviorism, actually lost the qualitative difference between higher and elementary functions when they tried to translate them into their own language, that is, to decompose both into some elementary components. “Meanwhile, the obviousness of the qualitative difference between the lower and higher mental functions made the weakness of such approaches obvious,” said Vygotsky. The psychological views of this approach believed that the development of the child, in essence, is only a more complex and developed version of the emergence and evolution of those forms of behavior that we already observe in the animal world. This psychology did not somehow explain how these forms of behavior become more complex, why, if they do not become something new, something that did not exist before, cannot appear in the animal world, why do they exist only in humans? How does all possible forms of learning occur in animals and humans? Psychology did not answer these questions, but only created the illusion of understanding this complex and intricate process.
Lev Semenovich begins his psychological research during the years of active penetration of Marxist ideology into Soviet science. Marxist philosophy was created jointly by two German scientists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the second half of the 19th century. and is an integral part of a broader doctrine - Marxism, which, along with philosophy, includes economics and socio-political issues.
The philosophy of Marxism provided answers to many burning questions of its time. It became widespread in the world and gained great popularity at the end of the 19th - the first half of the 20th centuries. In a number of countries, Marxist philosophy was elevated to the rank of official state ideology, including in the country in which Vygotsky lived.
Marxist philosophy is materialistic in nature and consists of two large sections - dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The philosophical innovation of K. Marx and F. Engels was the materialistic understanding of history. The essence of historical materialism is as follows:
) at each stage of social development, people enter into special, objective production relations that do not depend on their will to ensure their livelihoods;
) production relations, the level of productive forces form the economic system, which is the basis for the institutions of the state and society, public relations;
) these state and public institutions, public relations act as a superstructure in relation to the economic basis;
) The basis and superstructure mutually influence each other, depending on the level of development of productive forces and production relations, a certain type of basis;
) The growth of the level of production forces leads to a change in production relations and a change in socio-economic formations and the socio-political system;
) The level of the economy, material production, production relations determine the fate of the state and society, the course of history.
Also, Marx and Engels singled out and developed the following concepts: means of production, alienation, surplus value, exploitation of man by man.
Means of production - a unique product, a function of labor of the highest level, allowing the production of a new product. For the production of a new product, in addition to the means of production, a force serving them is needed - the so-called "labor force".
In the course of the evolution of capitalism, there is a process of alienation of the main working mass from the means of production and, consequently, from the results of labor. The main commodity - the means of production - is concentrated in the hands of a few owners, and the bulk of the working people, who do not have the means of production and independent sources of income, are forced to turn to the owners of the means of production as hired labor for wages in order to meet their vital needs.
The value of the product produced by hired labor is higher than the value of their labor, the difference between them, according to Marx, is surplus value, part of which goes into the pocket of the capitalist, and part is invested in new means of production to obtain even greater surplus value in the future.
The founders of Marxist philosophy saw a way out of this situation in the establishment of new, socialist socio-economic relations, in which:
) private ownership of the means of production will be abolished;
) the exploitation of man by man and the appropriation of the results of someone else's labor by a narrow group of persons will be eliminated;
a) private ownership of the means of production will replace public ownership;
) production product, the results of labor will be shared among all members of society through fair distribution.
The basis of the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels was the dialectic of Hegel, but on completely different, materialistic principles. In the words of Engels, Hegel's dialectic was put on its head by the Marxists. The following main provisions of dialectical materialism can be distinguished:
) the main question of philosophy is resolved in favor of being;
) consciousness is understood not as an independent entity, but as a property of matter to reflect itself;
) matter is in constant motion and development;
) There is no God, He is an ideal image, the fruit of human imagination to explain phenomena that are incomprehensible to mankind, and gives mankind consolation and hope; God has no influence on the surrounding reality;
) matter is eternal and infinite, periodically takes on new forms of its existence;
) an important factor in development is practice - the transformation by a person of the surrounding reality and the acquisition by a person of the person himself;
) development occurs according to the laws of dialectics - the unity and struggle of opposites, the transition of quantity into quality, the negation of negation.
Undoubtedly, Marxist philosophy influenced Vygotsky's views. It seems that there can be no doubt that Vygotsky's views were influenced by Marxist philosophy. The principles of this philosophy formed part of his understanding of the issues of consciousness and the psyche. Vygotsky himself in his writings repeatedly referred to Mars and quoted him. “On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life,” says Marx. He also quoted Engels: “Engels speaks just as decisively regarding the roots of speech in animals: “But within the limits of his circle of ideas, he can also learn to understand what he says, and further Engels gives a completely objective criterion for this understanding: Teach a parrot swear words so that he gets an idea of \u200b\u200btheir meaning (one of the main entertainments of sailors returning from hot countries), try to tease him then, and you will soon discover that he knows how to use his swear words as correctly as a Berlin greengrocer. Exactly the same is the case when begging for delicacies.
In order to understand the principles of Vygotsky's construction of the subject of his research, we must, first of all, take into account its general methodological orientation. The orientation toward the creation of a general psychological system was clearly manifested both in the methodological and theoretical-experimental works of Vygotsky. “All his works are methodological in spirit. Vygotsky's works were distinguished by a high methodological culture.
Important in the light of what has been said is the fact that Vygotsky wrote his contribution to science while he was ill. “Vygotsky wrote this work in a tragic situation: he was ill with tuberculosis, the doctors said that he had 3-4 months to live, he was placed in a sanatorium ... And then he began to write convulsively in order to leave some basic work behind him” .
After analyzing the historical meaning of the psychological crisis, Vygotsky revealed the internal driving forces behind the development of science. Such a driving force, according to Vygotsky, is the dialectical contradiction between the main generalization of science, its main concept and the explanatory principle: and the other together define a general science. The main generalization, as it were, gives science a semantic coloring, is the main means of understanding scientific facts. In turn, understanding presupposes the establishment of a causal relationship between facts, that is, understanding is at the same time the desire to identify an explanatory principle.
Also a characteristic feature of Vygotsky's work is criticism of the approaches and theories of various authors. Approaching the theories with a critical stance, he singled out their essential points, their advantages and disadvantages, and also rethought them, creating on this basis a true understanding of consciousness and the psyche. Most of the works of that time concerning the problem he was studying were criticized by him. This characteristic feature of his work can be easily seen in his writings. In his writings, he writes: “However, despite the theoretical views of Piaget himself, a number of objective data in his research, and partly our own research, speak in favor of the assumption that we made above and which, of course, is only a hypothesis, but from the point of view of everything that we now know about the development of children's speech, a hypothesis that is the most scientifically sound"? This is how Piaget criticizes. “Therein lies the basic error of any intellectualistic theory, and this one in particular, that in explaining it, it tries to proceed from what is, in essence, subject to explanation”? this is already a criticism of Stern.
On these sources, Vygotsky creates his theory and his cultural-historical approach. In this approach, Vygotsky proposes to consider the social environment not as one of the factors, but as the main source of personality development. In the development of the child, he notes, there are two intertwined lines of development. The development of thinking, perception, memory and other mental functions occurs through the stage of external activity. The child develops through cooperation with adults, it is cooperation with other people that is the main source of development of the child's personality, and the most important feature of consciousness is dialogue
In its development, a person goes through a series of changes that have a stage nature. More or less stable processes of development due to the lytic accumulation of new potentialities, the destruction of one social situation of development and the emergence of others are replaced by critical periods in the life of the individual, during which there is a rapid formation of psychological neoplasms. Crises are characterized by the unity of the destructive and constructive sides and play the role of steps in the progressive movement along the path of the child's further development. The apparent behavioral dysfunction of a child in a critical age period is not a pattern, but rather evidence of an unfavorable course of the crisis, the absence of changes in the inflexible pedagogical system, which does not keep up with the rapid change in the child's personality. Neoplasms that have arisen in a given period qualitatively change the psychological functioning of the individual.
Vygotsky defined the psyche as an active and biased form of reflection by the subject of the world. He repeatedly emphasized that mental reflection is not distinguished by a mirror character: a mirror reflects the world more accurately, more fully, but mental reflection is more adequate for the subject’s lifestyle - the psyche is a subjective distortion of reality in favor of the body.
Vygotsky sought to reveal, first of all, the specifically human in behavior and the history of the formation of this behavior; his theory required a change in the traditional approach to the process of mental development. In his opinion, the one-sidedness and fallacy of the traditional view of the facts of the development of higher mental functions lies, as Vygotsky said: “In the inability to look at these facts as facts of historical development, in one-sided consideration of them as natural processes and formations, in mixing and not distinguishing natural and cultural, natural and historical, biological and social in the mental development of the child, in short, in an incorrect fundamental understanding of the nature of the phenomena being studied.
Vygotsky was the first to move from asserting the importance of the environment for development to identifying a specific mechanism of environmental influence, which actually changes the child's psyche, leading to the emergence of higher mental functions specific to a person. Vygotsky showed that a person has a special kind of mental functions that are completely absent in animals. These functions, called by Vygotsky the highest mental functions, constitute the highest level of the human psyche, generally called consciousness. And they are formed in the course of social interactions. The higher mental functions of a person, or consciousness, are of a social nature. In order to clearly identify the problem, the author brings together three fundamental concepts, previously considered as separate - the concept of higher mental function, the concept of cultural development of behavior and the concept of mastering the processes of one's own behavior. “But now we will use this indisputable position as an example that can be extended simply due to the factual similarity of the scientific fate of many related problems to other higher functions, leaving aside for the time being the complex course of further thoughts that allows us to bring together in our eyes the three basic concepts of our study: the concept higher mental function, the concept of cultural development of behavior and the concept of mastering one's own behavioral processes. Just as the history of the development of the child's will has not yet been written, the history of the development of other higher functions has not yet been written: voluntary attention, logical memory, etc. This is a fundamental fact that cannot be overlooked.
Vygotsky's hypothesis was that mental processes are transformed in a person in the same way as the processes of his practical activity, that is, they also become mediated. But the tools themselves, being non-psychological things, cannot, according to Vygotsky, mediate mental processes. Consequently, there must be special psychological tools - tools of spiritual production. These psychological tools are various sign systems, by which he understood artificial means included by a person in a psychological situation. “Between the assertion that higher mental functions, of which the use of signs is an integral part, arise in the process of cooperation and social intercourse, and another assertion that these functions develop from primitive roots on the basis of lower, or elementary, functions, that is, between the sociogenesis of higher functions and their natural history, there is a genetic, not a logical contradiction." Signs are mental tools, which, unlike tools of labor, do not change the physical world, but the consciousness of the subject operating with them. A sign is any conventional symbol that has a specific meaning.
The use of a sign, a word as a specifically human mental regulator restructures all the higher mental functions of a person. Mechanical memory becomes logical, the associative flow of ideas - productive thinking and creative imagination, impulsive actions - arbitrary actions.
Higher mental functions arose with the help of a sign. The sign is an instrument of mental activity. It is an artificially created human stimulus, a means to control one's own behavior and the behavior of others. A sign can be called gestures, speech, notes, painting. The word, like oral and written speech according to Vygotsky, is a universal sign.
The original form of a sign's existence is always external. Then the sign turns into an internal means of organizing mental processes, which arises as a result of a complex step-by-step process of sign internalization. Strictly speaking, interiorization is not only and not so much a sign as the whole system of operations of mediation. At the same time, this means the internalization of relations between people. Vygotsky argued that if earlier the order and execution were divided between two people, now both actions were carried out by the same person. “This withdrawal of operations inward, this internalization of higher mental functions, associated with new changes in their structure, we call the process of rotation, meaning mainly the following: the fact that higher mental functions are built initially as external forms of behavior and are based on an external sign, by no means accidental, but, on the contrary, determined by the very psychological nature of the higher function, which, as we said above, does not arise as a direct continuation of elementary processes, but is a social mode of behavior applied to itself.
In contrast to the stimulus-means, which can be invented by the child himself, signs are not invented by children, but are acquired by them in communication with adults. Thus, the sign appears first on the outer plane, on the plane of communication, and then it passes into the inner plane, the plane of consciousness. At the same time, signs, being a product of social development, bear the imprint of the culture of the society in which the child grows up. Children learn signs in the process of communication and begin to use them to control their inner mental life. Thanks to the internalization of signs, a sign function of consciousness is formed in children, and such human mental processes as logical thinking, will, and speech are emerging. In other words, the internalization of signs is the mechanism that forms the psyche of children.
Following the idea of the socio-historical nature of the psyche, Vygotsky makes a transition to the interpretation of the social environment not as a factor, but as a source of personality development. In development, he notes, there are, as it were, two intertwined lines. The first follows the path of natural maturation. The second consists in mastering cultures, ways of behaving and thinking. Auxiliary means of organizing behavior and thinking that mankind has created in the process of its historical development are systems of signs-symbols. The sign is a tool developed by mankind in the processes of communication between people. It is a means of influencing, on the one hand, on another person, and on the other hand, on oneself. The mastery of the relationship between sign and meaning, the use of speech in the use of tools marks the emergence of new psychological functions, systems underlying higher mental processes that fundamentally distinguish human behavior from animal behavior.
According to Vygotsky, it is necessary to single out two lines of a child's mental development - natural and cultural development. The natural mental functions of an individual by their nature are direct and involuntary, due primarily to biological, or natural factors. The natural line of development is the physical, natural development from the moment of birth. It is not connected with activity and interaction with the environment, as a means of transforming oneself and others. The body does not require any efforts and efforts for their development, this development occurs by itself. Natural mental functions are inherent in all living beings. Another line of development is the line of cultural improvement of psychological functions, development of new ways of thinking, mastery of cultural means of behavior. Cultural development is born from the natural, just as the more complex is born from the simpler. Here, efforts and diligence are already required from the individual, as a mandatory rule for development. The environment no longer acts as something neutral and insignificant, it changes its role to the opposite, becoming an indispensable component for the development of the organism. The cultural line of development, in contrast to the natural line of development, is inherent only to man and no longer to any living being.
In the process of cultural development, not only separate functions change - new systems of higher mental functions arise, qualitatively different from each other at different stages of ontogenesis. Thus, as perception develops, it frees itself from its initial dependence on the affective-required sphere and begins to enter into close ties with memory, and subsequently with thinking. Thus, the primary connections between functions that have developed in the course of evolution are replaced by secondary connections built artificially - as a result of man's mastery of sign means, including language as the main sign system. Here, as Vygotsky said, the formation of higher mental functions takes place.
Speaking about the existence of natural and higher mental functions, Vygotsky comes to the conclusion that the main difference between them lies in the level of arbitrariness. According to Vygotsky: “With the development of higher mental processes, a restructuring of relations between them takes place, first with the leading role of perception, then memory, then logical, verbal thinking, as well as an increasing inclusion of arbitrariness and the use of various mediation techniques.” In other words, unlike natural mental processes that cannot be regulated by a person, people can consciously control higher mental functions.
For higher mental functions, the presence of an internal means is essential. The main way for the emergence of higher mental functions is the internalization of social forms of behavior into a system of individual forms. This process is not mechanical. Higher mental functions arise in the process of cooperation and social communication - and they also develop from primitive roots on the basis of lower ones.
Higher mental functions are initially possible as a form of cooperation with other people, and later become individual. A person does not have an innate form of behavior in the environment. Its development occurs through the appropriation of historically developed forms and methods of activity.
At the same time, the process of formation of the higher mental function will stretch for a decade, originating in verbal communication and ending in full-fledged symbolic activity. Through communication, a person masters the values of culture. Mastering the signs, a person joins the culture, the main components of his inner world are meanings and meanings. Vygotsky argued that mental development does not follow maturation, but is conditioned by the active interaction of the individual with the environment in the zone of his immediate mental development.
The driving force of mental development is learning. Development and learning are different processes. Development is the process of forming a person or personality, which takes place through the emergence of new qualities at each stage. Education is an internally necessary moment in the process of developing in a child the historical characteristics of mankind. Vygotsky believes that learning should lead to development, this idea was developed by him in developing the concept of the zone of proximal development. Communication between a child and an adult is by no means a formal moment in Vygotsky's concept. Moreover, the path through the other turns out to be central in development. Learning is, in fact, a specially organized communication. Communication with an adult, mastering the methods of intellectual activity under his guidance, as it were, set the short-term perspective of the child's development: it is called the zone of proximal development, in contrast to the current level of development. What is effective is learning that goes ahead of development, Vygotsky said.
2. Higher mental functions in the teachings of Vygotsky
2.1 The concept of higher mental functions
Vygotsky mental cultural historical
Higher mental functions are specific human mental processes. Vygotsky says that they arise on the basis of natural mental functions, due to their mediation by psychological tools. According to Vygotsky, the highest mental functions include perception<#"justify">The specificity of the human psyche and behavior is that they are mediated by cultural and historical experience. Naturally occurring mental processes and behavioral functions include elements of socio-historical experience, thereby transforming them. They become higher mental functions. The natural form of behavior is transformed into a cultural one.
To manage your mental functions, you need their awareness. If there is no representation in the psyche, then a process of exteriorization is needed, a process of creating external means. Culture creates special forms of behavior, it modifies the activity of mental functions, builds new floors in the developing system of human behavior.
In the process of historical development, social man changes the ways and means of his behavior, transforms natural inclinations and functions, develops new ways of behavior - specifically cultural ones. “Culture does not create anything, it only modifies natural data in accordance with the goals of man. Therefore, it is quite natural that the history of the cultural development of an abnormal child will be permeated with the influences of the child's fundamental defect or shortcoming. His natural reserves - these possible elementary processes from which the highest cultural methods of behavior should be built - are insignificant and poor, and therefore the very possibility of the emergence and sufficiently complete development of higher forms of behavior is often closed to such a child precisely because of the poverty of the material underlying at the basis of other cultural forms of behavior,” says Vygotsky. Higher mental functions come from natural natural functions.
In the process of cultural development, the child replaces some functions with others, laying detours. The basis of cultural forms of behavior is mediated activity, the use of external signs as a means of further development of behavior. The higher mental functions of a person are complex self-regulating processes, social in their origin, mediated in their structure and conscious, arbitrary in their way of functioning.
The social nature of higher mental functions is determined by their origin. They can develop only in the process of interaction of people with each other. The main source of emergence is internalization, that is, the transfer of social forms of behavior to the internal plane. Internalization is carried out in the formation and development of external and internal relations of the individual. Here the higher mental functions pass through two stages of development. First as a form of interaction between people, and then as an internal phenomenon.
The mediation of higher mental functions is visible in the ways of their functioning. The development of the capacity for symbolic activity and mastery of the sign is the main component of mediation. The word, image, number and other possible identifying signs of the phenomenon determine the semantic perspective of comprehension of the essence at the level of unity of abstraction and concretization. In this sense, thinking as operating with symbols, behind which there are representations and concepts, or creative imagination as operating with images, are the corresponding examples of the functioning of higher mental functions. In the process of functioning of higher mental functions, cognitive and emotional-volitional components of awareness are born: meanings and meanings.
Arbitrary higher mental functions are according to the method of implementation. Due to mediation, a person is able to realize his functions and carry out activities in a certain direction, anticipating a possible result, analyzing his experience, correcting behavior and activities. The arbitrariness of higher mental functions is also determined by the fact that the individual is able to act purposefully, overcoming obstacles and making appropriate efforts. A conscious desire for a goal and the application of efforts determines the conscious regulation of activity and behavior.
Unlike an animal, a person is born and lives in the world of objects created by social labor, and in the world of people with whom he enters into certain relationships. That is, he lives in the world of culture, in the world of historical culture, in a culture that created itself and now continues to create itself. This forms his mental processes from the very beginning. The child's natural reflexes are radically rebuilt under the influence of handling objects. “All behavioral processes in general are decomposed into combination reflexes of different length and number of links in the chain, which in other cases are inhibited and not revealed in the external part.”
A reflex can be defined as a natural holistic stereotypical reaction of the body to changes in the external environment or internal state, which is carried out with the mandatory participation of the central nervous system. The reflex is provided by the union of afferent, intercalary and efferent neurons that make up the reflex arc. Reflex is an adaptive reaction, it is always aimed at restoring the balance disturbed by changing environmental conditions. The nature of the reflex response depends on two features of the stimulus: the strength of the stimulus and the place on which it acts. Reflex responses are stereotyped: repeated action of the same stimulus on the same part of the body is accompanied by the same response. Here is a quote from Lev Vygotsky: “The very first reflexes of a newborn do not disappear anywhere, they continue to work, but already functioning as part of the formations of higher nervous activity.”
On the basis of these reflexes, new motor schemes are formed, creating, as it were, a cast of these objects, movements are likened to their objective properties. The same must be said about human perception, which is formed under the direct influence of the objective world of things that themselves have a social origin.
The most complex systems of reflex connections that reflect the objective world of objects require the joint work of many receptors and require the formation of new functional systems.
The child lives not only in the world of finished objects created by social labor. He always, from the very beginning of his life, enters into the necessary communication with other people, masters the objectively existing system of language, assimilates with its help the experience of generations. All this becomes a decisive factor in his further mental development, a decisive condition for the formation of those higher mental functions that distinguish man from animals.
Any operation that solves a practical problem with the use of a tool or solves an internal, psychological problem with the help of an auxiliary sign, which is a means for organizing mental processes, can serve as a model or principal model of the mediated structure of higher mental functions. In the mediation of mental processes, the decisive role belongs to speech.
In the early stages of their development, higher mental functions rely on the use of external reference signs and proceed as a series of special detailed operations. Only then they are gradually curtailed, and the whole process turns into an abbreviated action based on external, and then on internal speech.
A change in the structure of higher mental functions at different stages of ontogenetic development means that their cortical organization does not remain unchanged and that at different stages of development they are carried out by unequal constellations of cortical zones.
Vygotsky observed that the ratio of individual components that make up higher mental functions does not remain unchanged at successive stages of their development. At the early stages of their formation, relatively simple sensory processes that serve as the foundation for the development of higher mental functions play a decisive role, but at subsequent stages, when higher mental functions are already formed, this leading role passes to more complex systems of connections formed on the basis of speech. which begin to determine the entire structure of higher mental processes.
In short, higher mental functions are complex, life-forming mental processes that are social in origin. Distinctive features of higher mental functions are their mediated nature and arbitrariness. Vygotsky said: “All higher mental functions are internalized relations of the social order, the basis of the social structure of the personality. Their composition, genetic structure, mode of action, in a word, their whole nature is social; even turning into mental processes, it remains quasi-social.
2.2 Lawsandstagesdevelopmenthighermentalfunctions
Three main achievements of mankind contributed to the accelerated mental development of people: the invention of tools, the production of objects of material and spiritual culture, and the emergence of language and speech. With the help of tools, a person got the opportunity to influence nature and to know it more deeply. Man cognized the environment indirectly, without resorting specifically to the senses.
The improvement of tools and the labor operations performed with their help led, in turn, to the transformation and improvement of the functions of the hand, due to which it turned over time into the most subtle and accurate of all tools of labor activity. "As the classics of Marxism have shown, the human hand is both an organ and a product of labor." On the example of the hand, he learned to cognize the reality of the human eye, it also contributed to the development of thinking and created the main creations of human consciousness. With the expansion of knowledge about the world, the possibilities of man increased, he acquired the ability to be independent of nature and, according to understanding, change his own nature.
The objects of material and spiritual culture created by people of many generations did not disappear, but were passed on and reproduced from generation to generation, improving. There was no need for a new generation of people to reinvent them, it was enough to learn how to use them with the help of other people who already knew how to do it.
The mechanism of transmission of abilities, knowledge, skills and abilities by inheritance has changed. Now it was not necessary to change the genetic apparatus, anatomy and physiology of the organism in order to rise to a new stage of psychological and behavioral development. It was enough, having a flexible brain from birth, a suitable anatomical and physiological apparatus, to learn how to humanly use the objects of material and spiritual culture created by previous generations. In the tools of labor, in the objects of human culture, people began to inherit their abilities and assimilate them to the next generations without changing the genotype, anatomy and physiology of the body. "The former arise in a very slow evolutionary way, develop through natural selection, are fixed and inherited." Man has gone beyond his biological limitations and has opened for himself the path to almost limitless improvement.
Thus, gradually, accelerating, from century to century, the creative abilities of people improved, their knowledge of the world expanded and deepened, raising man higher and higher above the rest of the animal world. Over time, man invented and improved many things that have no analogues in nature. They began to serve him to satisfy his own material and spiritual needs and at the same time acted as a source for the development of human abilities.
From the very beginning of their use by people, sign systems, especially speech, have become an effective means of influencing a person on himself, controlling his perception, attention, memory and thinking. Along with the first signal system given to man by nature, which was the sense organs, a person received a second signal system, expressed in the word. The second signaling system has become a powerful means of self-management and self-regulation of a person. Perception has acquired such qualities as objectivity, constancy, meaningfulness, structure, attention has become arbitrary, memory - logical, thinking - verbal and abstract. Practically all human mental processes, as a result of the use of speech to control them, went beyond their natural limitations, got the opportunity for further, potentially unlimited improvement. In the words of Vygotsky: “Only then do psychological tools turn on themselves, that is, they become for a person a means of controlling their own mental processes.”
The word has become the main regulator of human actions, the bearer of moral and cultural values, the means and source of human civilization, its intellectual and moral improvement. It also acted as the main factor in education and training. Thanks to the word, the individual man became a person-person. Speech as a means of communication played a special role in the development of people.
Vygotsky repeatedly formulated the laws of development of higher mental functions. These laws are important elements in his theory. According to Vygotsky, the laws of development of higher mental functions are as follows:
1. Law of transition from natural to cultural forms<#"justify">Special preschool pedagogy has emerged as an independent direction in special pedagogy relatively recently. This allocation is due to the importance of early and preschool age for the upbringing, correction and compensation of deviations in the development of children.
The works of Vygotsky became fundamental for special and correctional preschool pedagogy, orienting specialists to a theoretical understanding of the role of biological and social factors in the development of a child's personality, problems of deviant development, as well as to the search for adequate methods and organizational forms of work with children with developmental disabilities. The significance of the cultural-historical factor that Vygotsky saw and derived by him laid the foundation for understanding the driving causes and conditions for the formation of the human personality. In his works it is proved that the social situation of education forms or delays the process of realizing the potential of the child. Taking into account the ratio of primary disorders and secondary deviations, as well as the recognition of the unevenness of child development, served as the basis for understanding the mechanisms of compensation and building corrective education and training on their basis. Vygotsky made a great contribution to Russian correctional pedagogy. All areas of modern correctional pedagogy are based on his fundamental experimental and theoretical research, many of which formed the basis for the development of entire psychological schools both in our country and abroad.
Vygotsky's works opened the way to understanding the nature of secondary disorders in the development of children with disabilities. He believed that any physical handicap not only changes the child's attitude to the world, but above all affects the relationship with people. He emphasized that the actual movement of the process of development of children's thinking takes place not from the individual to the socialized, but from the social to the individual. Vice is felt by the child only indirectly, secondarily, as the result of his social experience reflected on him.
The merit of Vygotsky is that he pointed out the fact that the development of a normal and abnormal child is subject to the same laws and goes through the same stages, but the stages are extended in time and the presence of a defect gives specificity to each variant of abnormal development. In addition to broken functions, there are always preserved functions. Corrective work should be based on preserved functions, bypassing affected functions. Vygotsky formulates the principle of corrective work, the principle of a detour.
For the practice of working with children, Vygotsky's concept "On the developmental nature of education" takes place. Education should lead to development, and this is possible if the teacher is able to determine the “zone of actual development” and the “zone of proximal development”.
Developing in child psychology the problem of the relationship between learning and development, Vygotsky came to the conclusion that learning should precede, run ahead and pull up, lead the development of the child. Learning must lead to development. Such an understanding of the correlation of these processes instilled in him the need to take into account both the current level of development of the child and his potential. Vygotsky defined the current level of mental development as the stock of knowledge and skills that a child had formed by the time of the study on the basis of already mature mental functions.
Vygotsky can also be called the founder of modern domestic psychology and defectology. He made a great contribution to the study of the personality of an abnormal child, to the substantiation of the problem of compensation for a defect in the process of specially organized upbringing and education of abnormal children.
He argued that the blind and deaf feel their inferiority not biologically, but socially. “It is not the defect in itself that decides the fate of the individual, but its social consequences, its socio-psychological organization ... the speaking deaf-mute, the working blind, the participants in the common life in its entirety, will not themselves feel inferiority and will not give a reason for this to others . It is in our hands to make sure that a deaf, blind and feeble-minded child is not handicapped. Then the very word disappears, a sure sign of our own defect.
Vygotsky’s position that “a child with a defect is not yet a defective child”, “that in itself blindness, deafness, and so on, private defects do not yet make their carrier defective”, that “substitution and compensation, as a law, arise in the form aspirations where there is a defect ”played a big role in the development of the theory and practice of modern pedagogy. This is evidenced by the fact that in the conditions of modern reality, unlimited all-round development of deaf children is possible.
The lofty goal of the social education of deaf children, its achievement in the real process of education presupposes a high quality of education. Even Vygotsky ardently defended the need for social special education of abnormal children, pointed out that the special education of abnormal children requires "special pedagogical techniques, special methods and techniques", and also that "only the highest scientific knowledge of this technique can create a real teacher in this area."
He emphasized that “we must not forget that it is necessary to educate not the blind, but the child first of all. To educate a blind and deaf person means to educate blindness and deafness, and from the pedagogy of childhood handicap to turn it into a defective pedagogy. Vygotsky's thoughts of the deepest meaning contain the idea of a specially organized upbringing of deaf children.
Vygotsky's ideas about the peculiarities of a child's mental development, about the zones of actual and immediate development, the leading role of training and education, the need for a dynamic and systematic approach to the implementation of corrective action, taking into account the integrity of personality development, have been reflected and developed in theoretical and experimental studies of domestic scientists, as well as in practice of different types of schools for abnormal children. In his works, Vygotsky paid much attention to the problem of studying anomalous children and their correct selection for special institutions.
The modern principles of child selection are rooted in Vygotsky's concept. Vygotsky took a new approach to the experimental study of the basic processes of thinking and to the study of how higher mental functions are formed and how they disintegrate in pathological states of the brain. Thanks to the work carried out by Vygotsky and his collaborators, the decay processes received their new scientific explanation. The theoretical and methodological concept developed by Vygotsky ensured the transition of defectology from empirical, descriptive positions to truly scientific foundations, contributing to the formation of defectology as a science.
His works served as a scientific basis for the construction of special schools and a theoretical substantiation of the principles and methods for studying the diagnosis of difficult children. Vygotsky left a legacy of enduring scientific significance, which entered the treasury of Soviet and world psychology, defectology, psychoneurology, and other related sciences. The research carried out by Vygotsky in all areas of defectology is still fundamental in the development of problems of development, training and education of abnormal children.
Conclusion
As a result of the analysis of the doctrine of the development of higher mental functions in the cultural-historical concept of Vygotsky, a number of conclusions can be drawn.
First, cultural-historical psychology is a trend in psychological research founded by Vygotsky in the late 1920s. and developed by his students and followers both in Russia and around the world.
Secondly, two fundamental provisions can be distinguished in Vygotsky's concept, firstly, higher mental functions have an indirect structure, and secondly, the process of development of the human psyche is characterized by the internalization of control relations and means-signs.
Thirdly, the higher mental functions of a person differ from the mental functions of animals in their properties, structure and origin: they are arbitrary, mediated, social.
The main conclusion of this concept is the following: a person is fundamentally different from an animal in that he has mastered nature with the help of tools. This left an imprint on his psyche - he learned to master his own higher mental functions. To do this, he uses psychological tools. Signs or symbolic means act as such tools. They have a cultural origin, with speech being the universal and most typical system of signs.
According to a number of researchers, Vygotsky's ideas, his theory of the development of higher mental functions, not only entered the history of world psychological thought, but also to a large extent determine the contours of the psychology of the present century. All of Vygotsky's main works have been published in many languages and continue to be published and republished. The cultural-historical theory of Vygotsky, which showed the role of the cultural and social in the development and formation of a person's personality, is widely used by researchers both in Russia and abroad. Both the theory itself and its main provisions are analyzed depending on the subject of the author's attention.
List of sources
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Vygotsky, L.S. Collected works: in 6 volumes / Ed. A.R. Luria, M.G. Yaroshevsky. - Moscow: Pedagogy, 1982.
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L. S. Vygotsky showed that a person has a special kind of mental functions that are completely absent in animals. These functions, called by L. S. Vygotsky the highest mental functions, constitute the highest level of the human psyche, generally called consciousness. They are formed in the course of social interactions i.e. have a social nature. At the same time, under the higher mental
functions are implied: arbitrary memory, arbitrary attention, logical thinking, etc.
Vygotsky's conception can be divided into three components.
"Human and nature".
in the transition from animals to humans, a fundamental change in the relationship of the subject with the environment took place. Throughout the existence of the animal world, the environment acted on the animal, modifying it and forcing it to adapt to itself. With the advent of man, the opposite process is observed: man acts on nature and modifies it.
the creation of tools of labor, in the development of material production (the thesis explains the existence of mechanisms for changing nature on the part of man).
"Man and his own psyche".
mastery of nature did not pass without a trace for a person, he learned to master his own psyche, he had WPF, expressed in forms of voluntary activity. HMF means: voluntary memory, voluntary attention, logical thinking, etc. (a person's ability to force himself to remember some material, pay attention to any object, organize his mental activity).
man mastered his behavior, as well as nature, with the help of tools, but special tools - psychological ones. These psychological tools he called signs.
Vygotsky called signs artificial means by which primitive man was able to master his behavior, memory, and other mental processes. The signs were objective, - a "knot for memory" or a notch on a tree also act as a sign, as a means by which they seize memory. For example, a person saw a notch and remembered what to do. Signs-symbols were the triggers of higher mental processes, that is, they acted as psychological tools.
"Genetic Aspects".
As a result, its organizing function was born from the external command function of the word. So a person learned to control his behavior. The ability to command oneself was born in the process of human cultural development.
It can be assumed that at first the functions of the person ordering and the person executing these orders were separated and the whole process, according to L. S. Vygotsky, was interpsychological, i.e. interpersonal. Then these relations turned into relations with oneself, that is, into intrapsychological. Vygotsky called the process of transformation of interpsychological relations into intrapsychological interiorization. In the course of internalization, external means-signs (notches, knots, etc.) are transformed into internal ones (images, elements of inner speech, etc.).
In ontogeny, according to Vygotsky, the same thing is observed in principle. First, the adult acts with the word on the child, prompting him to do something, and the child adopts the method of communication and begins to influence the adult with the word, then the child begins to influence himself with the word (2).
Conclusion:
HMFs have an indirect structure.
for the process of development of the human psyche is characteristic interiorization relations of management and means-signs.
The main conclusion is the following: a man is fundamentally different from an animal in that he has mastered nature with the help of tools. This left an imprint on his psyche - he learned to master his own HMF. To do this, he also uses tools, but psychological tools. Signs or symbolic means act as such tools. They have a cultural origin, with speech being the universal and most typical system of signs.
Consequently, human HMFs differ from the mental functions of animals in their properties, structure and origin: they arbitrary, mediated, social.
Today, in Russian psychology, the fundamental thesis is the assertion that the origin of human consciousness is associated with its social nature. Consciousness is impossible outside of society. The specifically human path of ontogenesis consists in the assimilation of socio-historical experience in the process of education and upbringing - socially developed ways of transferring human experience. These methods ensure the full development of the child's psyche (2).
In animals, species experience is transmitted in 2 ways:
hereditary - instinctive programs of behavior
(protection of cubs, obtaining food, creating a nest, mating dances).
imitation of parents and those animals that are next to the baby
The channel of individual learning is preserved, but a person has a social way of transferring species experience through culture.
The species experience of mankind is stored outside in culture. People through sign systems encode species experience and pass it on through the sign system to other generations. T.arr. The experience of mankind is stored in objects of material and spiritual culture. Therefore, a person who, at the moment of birth in words, born, a being unadapted to life, in order to become a person, must appropriate the cultural and historical experience of mankind. This process appropriations cultural and historical experience of mankind is called cultural development of man.
As a result of this appropriation, a person forms in himself special new human qualities, which Vygotsky called VPF.
Vygotsky: “The real carriers of culture, embodying phenomena - signs (speech, dance, painting, music, word, mathematical, communicative signs, works of art, myths, symbols)….. Signs- these are symbols that mankind has come up with to denote coding. The sign has a certain content. The content that is fixed in the sign is called meaning.
Sign- its meaning is fixed in the dictionary (content, meaning).
1. For mental changes, mankind has created artificial organs - signs, and first of all - speech. Vygotsky considered the sign and its meaning to be the basis of human consciousness.
2. the mental development of a person is carried out not through adaptation, but through the process appropriation of historically developed forms and methods of activity.
3. Vygotsky introduced the concept natural and higher mental functions. Man is born with natural inclinations and functions.
Vyg.: “In the process of historical development, a social person changes natural inclinations and functions, develops and creates new forms of behavior - specifically cultural ones - this is the HMF, i.e. assimilation of culture creates special forms of behavior. In the course of assimilation of culture, the entire mental makeup of a person changes. Vyg. he emphasized the processes of mastering external sign systems: language, writing, counting, drawing, etc., the process of mastering the HMF: voluntary attention, logical memory, etc.
4. driving force mental development of a person is not organic maturation, but appropriation of socially developed experience. This appropriation is possible only in the process of learning, therefore, according to Vygotsky, the driving force behind mental development is - training and education.
Vyg. emphasized the role of the adult, without whom the mental development of the child would not occur. Only an adult can open the content of signs to a child.
Training is effective in the zone of proximal development.
Consistency- the process of growth and development of lower and higher mental functions, which form a single holistic process. They merge and coincide with one another (10).
L. S. Vygodsky emphasized unity of hereditary and social moments in development. Heredity is present in the development of all the child's mental functions, but it seems to have a different proportion.
Elementary functions (starting with sensations and perceptions) are more hereditary than higher (arbitrary memory, logical thinking, speech). Higher functions are a product of the cultural and historical development of man, and hereditary inclinations here play the role of prerequisites, and not the moments that determine mental development. The more complex the function, the longer the path of its ontogenetic development, the less the influence of heredity affects it.
According to L. S. Vygotsky , Wednesday acts in relation to the development of higher mental functions as source development. The attitude to the environment changes with age, and consequently, the role of the environment in development also changes. The environment must be considered not absolutely, but relatively, since the influence of the environment is determined experiences child, which are the knot in which the diverse influences of various external and internal circumstances are tied (11).
Vygotsky formulated 4 laws of the child's mental development.
Cyclicity, unevenness, a combination of evolution and involution, human metamorphosis, changes qualitatively, changes are valuable for each period.
L. S. Vygotsky formulated a number of laws of the mental development of the child.
1. Child development has complex organization in time: its own rhythm, which does not coincide with the rhythm of time and which changes in different years of life. The value of each year or month of a child's life is determined by the place he occupies in the cycles of development. So, a year of life in infancy is not equal to a year of life in adolescence. Periods of rise, intensive development are replaced by periods of slowdown, attenuation.
2. Law of Metamorphosis in child development: there is development chain of quality changes. A child is not just a small adult who knows less or can do less, but a being with a qualitatively different psyche. At each age level, it is qualitatively different from what was before and what will be later.
3. The Law of Irregularity child/development: each side in the child's psyche has its optimal period of development. This law is connected with the hypothesis of L. S. Vygotsky about the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness.
Initially, in infancy up to a year, the child's consciousness is undifferentiated. Differentiation of functions begins in early childhood. First, the main functions are distinguished and developed, primarily perception, then more complex ones. Perception, intensively developing, as if moves forward to the center of consciousness and becomes the dominant mental process. Initially, it is merged with emotions - "affective perception".
The remaining functions are on the periphery of consciousness and depend on the dominant function.
Each age period is associated with a restructuring of interfunctional relationships - a change in the dominant function, the establishment of new relationships between them (11).
Age sensitivity is the optimal combination of conditions inherent in a certain age period for the development of certain mental properties and processes. Premature or delayed in relation to the sensitive period, training may not be effective enough, which adversely affects the development of the psyche. During sensitive periods, the child is especially sensitive to the learning and development of certain functions ().
4. The law of development of higher mental functions. Higher mental functions initially arise as a form of collective behavior, as a form of cooperation with other people, and only later do they become internal individual functions (forms) of the child himself (11).
The biological type of development occurs in the process fixtures to nature through the inheritance of the properties of the species and through individual experience. A person does not have innate forms of behavior in the environment. Its development occurs through the appropriation of historically developed forms and methods of activity.
According to L. S. Vygotsky, driving force of mental development - training. It is important to note that development and learning are different processes. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the development process has internal laws of self-expression. He considers development as the formation of a person or personality, which takes place through the emergence at each stage of new qualities specific to a person, prepared by the entire previous course of development, but not contained in finished form at earlier stages. . Learning, according to L. S. Vygotsky, is an internally necessary and universal moment in the process of development in a child of not natural, but historical features of a person. Learning is not the same as development. It creates zone of proximal development i.e., arouses in the child an interest in life, awakens and sets in motion the internal processes of development, which at first are possible for the child only in the sphere of relationships with others and cooperation with comrades, but then, penetrating the entire internal course of development, become the property of the child himself .
Zone of Proximal Development- this is the distance between the level of actual development of the child and the level of possible development, determined with the help of tasks solved under the guidance of adults. The zone of proximal development defines functions that have not yet matured, but are in the process of maturation; functions that can be called not the fruits of development, but the buds of development, the flowers of development.
and educational psychology, as the emergence and development of higher mental functions, the relationship between learning and mental development, the driving forces and mechanisms of the mental development of the child.
The zone of proximal development is a logical consequence of the law of the formation of higher mental functions, which are formed first and jointly, in cooperation with other people and gradually become the internal mental processes of the subject. When the mental process is formed in joint activities, it is in the zone of proximal development; after formation, it becomes a form of actual development of the subject.
The phenomenon of the zone of proximal development indicates the leading role of education in the mental development of children. According to L. S. Vygotsky, learning is only good when it goes ahead of development. Then it awakens and brings to life many other functions that lie in the zone of proximal development. As applied to the school, this means that teaching should focus not so much on already matured functions, completed cycles of development, but on maturing functions.
Education and activity are inseparable, they become a source of development of the child's psyche. The main changes in the formation of mental functions and personality of the child, occurring at each age stage, are due to leading activity.
Ermolaeva.
Cultural-historical concept of mental development by L. S. Vygotsky
L.S. Vygotsky for the first time (1927) put forward the thesis that the historical approach should become the leading principle in the construction of human psychology. He gave a theoretical critique of the biological, naturalistic concepts of man, opposing them with his theory of cultural and historical development. The most important thing was that he introduced the idea of the historicism of the nature of the human psyche, the idea of transforming the natural mechanisms of mental processes in the course of socio-historical and ontogenetic development into concrete psychological research. This transformation was understood by L. S. Vygotsky as a necessary result of a person's assimilation of the products of human culture in the process of his communication with other people.
L.S. Vygotsky wrote that in the course of ontogenesis, the whole peculiarity of the transition from one system of activity (animal) to another (human) made by a child lies in the fact that one system not only replaces the other, but both systems develop simultaneously and jointly: a fact that does not have similar to themselves neither in the history of the development of animals, nor in the history of the development of mankind.
If in the biological development of man the organic system of activity dominates, and in the historical development - the instrumental system of activity, if in phylogenesis, therefore, both systems are presented separately and developed separately from one another, then in ontogenesis - and this is one thing, bringing together both plans for the development of behavior : animal and human, makes the whole theory of biogenetic recapitulation completely untenable - both systems develop simultaneously and jointly. This means that in ontogeny the development of the activity system reveals a dual conditionality.
As is known, L. S. Vygotsky based his research on the following two hypotheses: the hypothesis of the mediated nature of human mental functions and the hypothesis of the origin of internal mental processes from initially external and “interpsychological” activity.
According to the internalization hypothesis, mental activity initially originates from external activity through internalization (growing inward) and retains its most important features, which include instrumentality and sociality. The "search" for these two most important features in the content of mental activity led L. S. Vygotsky to formulate these hypotheses and the law of formation of higher mental functions. Higher mental functions (speech, voluntary attention, voluntary memory, object perception, conceptual thinking) he called historical, arbitrary and mediated. Arbitrariness was understood in this case primarily as purposefulness: in the process of ontogenesis, the child learns to control his mental activity, to remember something or pay attention to something of little interest in accordance with the goal (to remember, to pay attention). But what allows the child to master his mental activity? L. S. Vygotsky spoke about the presence of an internal tool or means of mastery, by which he understood a sign fixed primarily in the word, the meaning of the word. L. S. Vygotsky considered speech as a universal sign system that enables the child to master all other cognitive functions.
Thus, according to the first of the hypotheses, specifically human features of the psyche arise due to the fact that previously direct, “natural” processes turn into mediated ones due to the inclusion of an intermediate link (“stimulus - means”) in behavior. For example, in mediated memorization, closing elementary connections are structurally united by means of a mnemotechnical sign. In other cases, this role is carried out by the word.
Of fundamental importance was the second hypothesis, simultaneously put forward by L. S. Vygotsky, according to which the mediated structure of the mental process is initially formed under conditions when the intermediate link has the form of an external stimulus (and, consequently, when the corresponding process also has an external form). This position made it possible to understand the social origin of a new structure that does not arise from within and is not invented, but is necessarily formed during communication, which in humans is always mediated.
L. S. Vygotsky wrote that everything internal in higher forms was originally external, that is, it was for others what it is now for itself. Any higher mental function necessarily passes through an external stage of development. To say “external” about a process is to say “social”. Every higher mental function was external because it was social before it became an internal, proper mental function; it was first a social relationship between two people. L. S. Vygotsky formulated the general genetic law of cultural development in the following form: every function in the cultural development of a child appears on the stage twice, on two planes, first social, then psychological, first between people as an interpsychic category, then inside the child as a category intrapsychic. This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, to the formation of concepts, to the development of the will. Behind all higher functions, their relations are genetically social relations of people. The mechanism itself, underlying the higher mental functions, is a cast from the social. All higher mental functions are internalized relations of the social order, the basis of the social structure of the personality. Their composition, genetic structure, mode of action - in a word, their whole nature is social; even turning into mental processes, it remains quasi-social. Man and alone with himself retains the function of communication. Thus, according to this law, the psychic nature of a person is a set of social relations that have been transferred inward and become functions of the personality and forms of its structure.
According to the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, developed by his students A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria, through the organization of external activity, it is possible and should organize internal activity, that is, self-developing mental processes proper.
Internalization takes place through the “appropriation” by the psyche of the structures of external activity, its mastery in the course of jointly distributed work with the “other” (where the “other” is not an external moment, but the most important structural component of this process), with the developing activity of the personality, its self-movement, self-development. It is this self-development of the internal structures of activity that forms the real psychological background against which education is placed as the formation of personality. So, in accordance with the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky, the development of the psyche in ontogeny can be represented as a process of appropriation by the child of socio-historical methods of external and internal activity.
In conclusion of the analysis of the cultural-historical concept of L. S. Vygotsky, we present its main provisions, thesis outlined by his student and follower A. N. Leontiev. “The mediated structure of mental processes always arises on the basis of the assimilation of such forms of behavior by an individual person, which initially take shape as forms of directly social behavior. At the same time, the individual masters the link (“stimulus-means”) that mediates this process, whether it be a material means (tool), or socially developed verbal concepts, or some other signs. Thus, another fundamental position was introduced into psychology - the position that the main mechanism of the human psyche is the mechanism of assimilation of social, historically established types and forms of activity. Since, in this case, activity can occur only in its external expression, it was assumed that the processes learned in their external form are further transformed into internal, mental processes.
The cultural-historical concept helped L. S. Vygotsky formulate a number of laws of the mental development of the child. The most important among them, as already mentioned, is the law of the formation of higher mental functions. Recall that, according to this law, higher mental functions arise initially as a form of collective behavior, as a form of cooperation with other people, and only later do they become internal individual (forms) functions of the child himself. Distinctive features of higher mental functions: mediation, awareness, arbitrariness, consistency; they are formed in vivo; they are formed as a result of the mastery of special tools, means developed in the course of the historical development of society; The development of external mental functions is associated with learning in the broad sense of the word; it cannot take place otherwise than in the form of assimilation of given patterns, therefore this development goes through a number of stages.
Closely related to this law and developing its content is the law of uneven child development, according to which each side in the child's psyche has its own optimal period of development. This period in developmental psychology is called the sensitive period. Age sensitivity is the optimal combination of conditions inherent in a certain age period for the development of certain mental properties and processes. Premature or delayed in relation to the sensitive period, training may not be effective enough, which adversely affects the development of the psyche. Thus, during sensitive periods, the child is especially sensitive to the learning and development of certain functions. Why is this happening? L. S. Vygotsky explains the essence of age sensitivity in his hypothesis about the systemic and semantic structure of consciousness. The system structure of consciousness is the structure of individual mental processes (perception, memory, thinking, etc.), in which at a given stage of development some process occupies a decisive place. At one stage this place is occupied by perception, at the next by memory, and so on.
Such qualitative changes in consciousness are inseparable from changes in its semantic structure, by which L. S. Vygotsky understood the structure of generalization characteristic of each stage of development. Thanks to this understanding of mental development, L. S. Vygotsky turned the thesis into a theory: a child is not a small adult.
The concept of sensitive ages and the hypothesis of a systemic structure of consciousness were of great importance for understanding the patterns of a child's mental development and the role of learning in this process. It turned out that not a single function develops in isolation: the timing and nature of the development of each function depend on what place it occupies in the overall structure of functions. Each mental function in a period that is sensitive to itself forms the center of this system, and all other mental processes develop in each period under the influence of this function that forms consciousness. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the process of mental development consists in the restructuring of the systemic structure of consciousness, which is due to changes in its semantic structure. Thus, the first significant stage of development - from one to three years - is sensitive for the development of speech. Mastering speech, the child receives a system of means of mastering other functions, which L. S. Vygotsky called historical, arbitrary, meaningful. This process is carried out only in the learning process. If a child at this age is brought up in a depleted speech environment, this leads to a noticeable lag in speech development, and later in other cognitive functions. From two to four years - a sensitive period for the development of subject perception, senior preschool age - a sensitive period for the development of arbitrary memory, junior school age - for the development of conceptual thinking. As for voluntary attention, L. S. Vygotsky considers preschool age to be its sensitive period of development, but numerous experimental studies show that this function at a motion sickness age begins to form no earlier than five years.
Analysis of the laws of mental development, formulated by L. S. Vygotsky, allows us to reveal the essence of perhaps the most important problem in Russian developmental and pedagogical psychology - the problem of learning and development.
Sapogov.
One of the fundamental ideas of L. S. Vygotsky is that in the development of a child's behavior it is necessary to distinguish between two intertwined lines. One is natural "ripening". The other is cultural improvement, mastery of cultural ways of behaving and thinking.
Cultural development consists in mastering such auxiliary means of behavior that mankind has created in the process of its historical development and such as language, writing, number system, etc.; cultural development is associated with the assimilation of such methods of behavior, which are based on the use of signs as means for the implementation of one or another psychological operation. Culture modifies nature in accordance with the goals of man: the mode of action, the structure of the method, the whole system of psychological operations changes, just as the inclusion of a tool rebuilds the entire structure of a labor operation. The external activity of the child can turn into internal activity, the external method, as it were, is ingrained and becomes internal (internalized).
L. S. Vygotsky owns two important concepts that determine each stage of age development - the concept of the social situation of development and the concept of neoplasm.
Under the social situation of development, L. S. Vygotsky meant the peculiar, specific for a given age, exclusive, unique and inimitable relationship between a person and the reality surrounding him, especially the social one, emerging at the beginning of each new stage. The social situation of development is the starting point for all changes that are possible in a given period, and determines the path, following which a person acquires high-quality developmental formations.
L. S. Vygotsky defined neoplasm as a qualitatively new type of personality and interaction of a person with reality, which was absent as a whole at the previous stages of its development.
L. S. Vygotsky established that the child in mastering himself (his behavior) follows the same path as in mastering external nature, i.e. from the outside. He masters himself as one of the forces of nature, with the help of a special cultural technique of signs. A child who has changed the structure of his personality is already another child, whose social being cannot but differ in a significant way from that of a child of an earlier age.
A leap in development (a change in the social situation of development) and the emergence of neoplasms are caused by fundamental contradictions of development that take shape at the end of each segment of life and “push” development forward (for example, between maximum openness to communication and the lack of a means of communication - speech in infancy; between the growth of subject skills and the inability to implement them in "adult" activities at preschool age, etc.).
Accordingly, L. S. Vygotsky defined age as an objective category for designating three points: 1) the chronological framework of a particular stage of development, 2) a specific social situation of development that takes shape at a particular stage of development, 3) qualitative neoplasms that arise under its influence.
In his periodization of development, he proposes to alternate stable and critical ages. In stable periods (infancy, early childhood, preschool age, primary school age, adolescence, etc.) there is a slow and steady accumulation of the smallest quantitative changes in development, and in critical periods (newborn crisis ™, crisis of the first year of life, crisis of three years, the crisis of seven years, the puberty crisis, the crisis of 17 years, etc.) these changes are found in the form of irreversible neoplasms that have arisen abruptly.
At each stage of development there is always a central neoformation, as if leading the entire process of development and characterizing the restructuring of the entire personality of the child as a whole on a new basis. Around the main (central) neoplasm of a given age, all other partial neoplasms related to certain aspects of the child's personality, and development processes associated with neoplasms of previous ages are located and grouped.
Those developmental processes that are more or less directly related to the main neoplasm, Vygotsky calls the central lines of development at a given age, and all other partial processes, changes occurring at a given age, he calls side lines of development. It goes without saying that the processes that were the central lines of development at a given age become secondary lines in the next, and vice versa - the secondary lines of the previous age come to the fore and become central lines in the new one, as their significance and share in the overall structure change. development, their attitude to the central neoplasm changes. Consequently, during the transition from one stage to another, the entire structure of age is reconstructed. Each age has its own specific, unique and inimitable structure.
Understanding development as a continuous process of self-movement, the incessant emergence and formation of something new, he believed that neoplasms of “critical” periods subsequently do not persist in the form in which they arise during the critical period, and are not included as a necessary component in the integral structure of the future personality. They die, being absorbed by neoplasms of the next (stable) age, being included in their composition, dissolving and transforming into them.
A huge multifaceted work led L. S. Vygotsky to construct the concept of the connection between learning and development, one of the fundamental concepts of which is the zone of proximal development.
We determine by tests or other methods the level of mental development of the child. But at the same time, it is absolutely not enough to take into account what the child can and can do today and now, it is important that he can and will be able tomorrow, what processes, even if not completed today, are already “ripening”. Sometimes a child needs a leading question, an indication of a solution, etc. to solve a problem. Then imitation arises, like everything that the child cannot do on his own, but what he can learn or what he can do under the guidance or in cooperation with another, older or more knowledgeable person. But what a child can do today in cooperation and under guidance, tomorrow he becomes able to do independently. By examining what the child is capable of accomplishing on his own, we examine the development of yesterday. Exploring what the child is able to accomplish in cooperation, we determine the development of tomorrow - the zone of proximal development.
L. S. Vygotsky criticizes the position of researchers who believe that a child must reach a certain level of development, his functions must mature before he can start learning. It turns out, he believed, that learning “lags behind” development, development always goes ahead of learning, learning simply builds on development without changing anything in essence.
L. S. Vygotsky proposed a completely opposite position: only that training is good, which is ahead of development, creating a zone of proximal development. Education is not development, but an internally necessary and universal moment in the process of development in a child of not natural, but cultural and historical features of a person. In training, the prerequisites for future neoplasms are created, and in order to create a zone of proximal development, i.e. to generate a number of internal development processes, properly constructed learning processes are needed.
