“Standing a head taller” is an empowering theme that Soviet cognitive psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky mentions from time to time, and he notices this quality most with the children he observed throughout his career. In these cases, imaginative play allows a child to internalize the activities of older individuals, learning and developing in the “zone” which continues to motivate the mind throughout one’s life. Most people seem to believe this development stops at a certain age, adulthood (anywhere between 13 and 24, according to different cultural beliefs), but I would argue that we continue to see ourselves a head taller, especially those who embrace the idea of life-long learning. For the majority who became adults and stopped the imaginative play, a good reminder will come when a person visits a place from their recent past: an old school, first job site or even the home to which, we are told, we can never go back. Recalling the feelings of that time when we hoped and dreamed to be grown up might make one feel a head taller than they were, but children get to live this experience everyday, a head taller than they are. Perhaps this is why someone like Vygotsky wanted to surround himself with these young active learners, as he could share in their enthusiasm to try new things for the rest of his tragically shortened life he knew, at the age of 26, he was going to live.
In the pages of Mind in Society, Vygotsky vents some of his frustration at adults who accept that things are the way they are, contemporary psychologists like Ted Thorndike and Jean Piaget, and their view of adulthood as the end of the developmental line. Equally frustrating is their search for the lower limits of ability, the beginning of a developmental stage where children or certain animals could do some things or not do some things. Given the proper amount of observation, children will never cease to impress open-minded adults that there are not many things they can’t do: anything that can be imagined could be played out. Vygotsky and his team had the right amount of patience for such viewings of children, infants and people with cognitive exceptionalities as able learners who go through a process of interpersonal (the mind in a society) and intrapersonal (internalizing society) adaptation. Attempts to get candy from a shelf or using coloured cards to recall instructions for a game of questions, both experiments described in this book, meet the participants at their level of cognitive ability. While he share opinions and gives respect to other constructivists and behaviorists in their respective fields, it seems a challenge for Vygotsky to accept their limiting theories; both “Problems of Method” and “Interaction between Learning and Development” are places where Vygotsky hashes out how quickly these theories fall apart. Setting limits is akin to censorship, something Vygotsky struggled with professionally in Soviet Russia.
Borrowing a quote from another Soviet author who faced censorship and limitations, Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s “manuscripts don’t burn” is very applicable. It is impressive how so much of Vygotsky’s thoughts survive on paper, and how many decades later his ideas are finally catching hold of minds in a far wider society than most people would have imagined. Somehow I know Vygotsky would have imagined it like this.