Vygotsky Quotes

Through others we become ourselves.

... People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider.

Through others, we become ourselves.

By giving our students practice in talking with others, we give them frames for thinking on their own.

Language is the tool of the tools

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i.e., to act according to the line of greatest resistance.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

Internal and external action are inseparable: imagination, interpretation, and will are internal processes in external action.

We are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others; and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. I am aware of myself only to the extent that I am as another for myself.

Art is the collectivisation of feeling.

It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).

The internalization of socially rooted historically developed activities is the distinguishing feature of human psychology.

The individual becomes for himself what he is in himself through what he manifests for others.

Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.

Anthropologist and teacher Margaret Mead said in Redbook magazine in 1963, “If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the University and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Lev Vygotsky, the great Russian psychologist, used to speak of “thinking in pure meanings.” I cannot decide whether this is nonsense or profound truth—it is the sort of reef I end up on when I think about thinking.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the University and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

Piaget has helped teachers of young children to see how important it is for children to experience whatever we want them to learn about.

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, sólo es posible el más primitivo y limitado' tipo de comunicación; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afecto.

GENERAL BOOKS ABOUT LANGUAGE Highly readable, witty, and provocative is Roger Brown’s Words and Things. Also readable, magnificent, though sometimes too dogmatic, is Eric H. Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. The deepest and most beautiful explorations of all are to be found in L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, originally published in Russian, posthumously, in 1934, and later translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Vygotsky has been described—not unjustly—as “the Mozart of psychology.” A personal favorite of mine is Joseph Church’s Language and the Discovery of Reality: A Developmental Psychology of Cognition, a book one goes back to again and again.

According to Piaget, the best strategy for preschool curriculum is to keep children curious, make them wonder, and offer them real problem-solving challenges, rather than give them information. Many adults still hold the notion that a teacher is someone who shares information. Using Piaget’s theory about children’s learning requires changing the image of teacher into someone who nurtures inquiry and supports the children’s own search for answers.

In his excellent and extremely comprehensive text, Engestrom (1991) locates Vygotsky's ideas within a dialectic approach, which was undoubtedly the framework that Vygotsky himself was exploring but never had time to develop in detail. There is no doubt that Engestrom offers a very distinctive perspective on Vygotsky's approach to concept formation. At the same time, by making clear what is involved in thinking about concepts within the notoriously (and perhaps inevitably) slippery terms of dialectic logic, his account also suggests why, for all its evocative power as critique, the dialectical method is unable to fulfil its promise as a theory for generating new knowledge.

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, solo es posible el más primitivo y limitado tipo de comunicación"; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afectos. (pag. 12-cap. 1)

En ausencia de un sistema de signos lingüísticos u otros, solo es posible el más primitivo y limitado tipo de comunicación; ésta, que se manifiesta por medio de movimientos expresivos, observados fundamentalmente entre los animales, no es tanto comunicación como expresión de afectos. (pag. 12-cap. 1)

Tanto para Piaget como para Vygotsky, el error es el motor que lleva a la formación de nuevos conocimientos.

While Piaget often is considered an individual constructivist and Vygotsky a social constructivist, the line between individual and social constructivism can easily become blurred: Even though Piaget was interested primarily in how meaning is individually constructed, he acknowledged social experiences as an important factor in cognitive development (Lourenço & Machado, 1996; Paris, Byrnes, & Paris, 2001).

While Vygotsky was interested primarily in social and cultural interactions as triggers of cognitive change, his theory actually emphasizes knowledge construction as both socially mediated and individually constructed (Moshman, 1997; Palincsar, 1998; Windschitl, 2002).

During instruction, teachers should provide problem-solving activities that enable students to use scientific concepts in practical ways. This allows scientific concepts to meet students’ personal, concrete experiences so their spontaneous concepts become structured and conscious (Karpov, 2006; Vygotsky, 1987).

Recognize cultural context in learning situations. Consistent with Vygotsky’s theory, teachers need to consider how the setting of particular instructional activities and the larger cultural context may affect learning (Griffin & Cole, 1999; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988).

Erikson felt that the early childhood years were critical in children’s development of trust, autonomy

Consciousness is reflected in the word like the sun in a drop of water. Lev Vygotsky--Thought and Language

Early childhood education

strong focus on the arts and on play, creativity and imagination, the emotions, and their role in thinking, is

Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves. In the early twentieth century, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was one of the first people to explore the connection between language development and self-control. He was interested in the curious behavior of children who talk to themselves out loud, coaching themselves along while also doling out self-critiques. As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

This is the final thing I have done in psychology – and I will like Moses die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence.

The idea of inner speech was made famous by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. He noted that it is not quite the same thing as ordinary spoken language, as it is not as formal or rigid. Vygotsky was interested in how children acquire and use inner speech in the process of cognitive development. As explained by Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices, “It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world.” Language and deliberative thought, and even consciousness, are closely entwined.

In play, rule becomes affect

In the 1930s, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed that inner speech is accompanied by tiny muscular movements in the larynx. Based on this, he argued that inner speech developed through the internalization of out-loud speech. In the 1990s, neuroscientists confirmed his view; they used neuroimaging to demonstrate that areas of the brain such as the left inferior frontal gyrus, which are active when we speak out loud, are also active during inner speech. That voice inside your head truly is your brain talking, even though you’re the only one who can hear it.

It is a ground for legitimate criticism, however, when the ongoing movement of progressive education fails to recognize that the problem of selection and organization of subject matter for study and learning is fundamental,” he responded (Dewey 1938, 78).

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Cognitive development principles, including Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, guide transformative teaching by recognizing that students progress through distinct cognitive stages and thus require tailored instruction and support to advance their learning effectively.