Abstract
The question of the duration of the intra-uterine and the extra-uterine periods in child development. The intra-uterine period of development. The age of infancy. Early childhood. Preschool age. School age.
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Notes
- 1.
Efim Aronovich Arkin (Eфим Apoнoвич Apкин, 1871–1948) studied to be a pediatrician in Switzerland and served in the Russo-Japanese War in the Far East, where he looked after child refugees. This got him interested in preschool work, and in 1924 he organized the first department in preschool pedagogy at the Number Two Moscow State University, where these lectures are published.
- 2.
Notice the difference between dogs and wolves, which should be similar to the difference between, say, humans and apes. Dogs live about ten to thirteen years in captivity but wolves only live about half of that in the wild. Similarly, chimps live as long as humans in captivity, and humans “in the wild” live as long as chimps in the wild. Historical control and cultural design of the social environment, it would appear, bestows an extra lifespan.
- 3.
Vygotsky is making a distinction between some psychologists (in the last paragraph) who believe that the organism itself is plastic, and other psychologists (this paragraph) who believe that it is only the “reaction” of the organism that is plastic. As he says, one explanation is as right as the other. Vygotsky is neither pre-formist nor re-formist: he is neither an innatist who believes that all reactions to the environment are inborn instincts nor a behaviorist who believes that every generation can learn reactions anew, but what they learn are the same reactions. Vygotsky believes in neoformationism, what we call epigenesis today. Development means the development of new forms in response to new challenges.
- 4.
A newly fertilized human zygote is about 0.01 mm. So to grow into a 50 cm baby requires fifty thousand-fold growth.
- 5.
Here and in subsequent paragraphs, Vygotsky demonstrates remarkable knowledge—even foreknowledge—of fetal alcohol syndrome. In the West, knowledge of fetal alcohol syndrome, with a few heroic exceptions, dates from the late 1960s. As late as the 1980s, North American and European doctors regularly prescribed alcohol to prevent premature labor.
- 6.
Note that “vegetative functions” in psychology are those neurological functions which are:
-
1.
Autonomic (i.e. controlled by the hypothalamus, the midbrain and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, not the cerebral cortex, the outer brain and the voluntary nervous system).
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2.
Essential to maintaining life (i.e. involuntary and instinctive and not volitional and habitual or once-occurrent).
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Shared with animals and to some extent even with plants (e.g. metabolism, excretion, reproduction, endocrine equilibrium, sleep, and basic instincts and not learned habits, intelligent behaviors, or acts of free will such as thinking or speech).
When we say that a comatose person is in a vegetative state we mean that their brain has been reduced to its vegetative functions.
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1.
- 7.
In 1828, i.e. nearly twenty years before the Origin of Species, Karl Ernst von Baer noticed that human embryos appear to have the gill slits of fish, and he suggested that this is because gill slits characterize all vertebrates. Then Fritz Müller (1821–1897) suggested that embryology offers a “historical record” of evolution, and this was formulated, by Ernst Haeckel, in the slogan “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Haeckel tried to prove this by showing the similarity between dog and human embryos at four weeks and their dissimilarity at six weeks, compared with turtle and hen embryos. His drawings were later shown to be very inaccurate and, as Vygotsky points out, the whole theory is unscientific.
Haeckel was a racist who believed that humans did not have a single origin in Africa, as Darwin suggested, but instead derived from different species, with the Asian being the only truly human race, and black people being only a species of “four handed ape.” He used differences in language to “prove” this, arguing that different languages had different meaning potentials. The Nazis later used many of Haeckel’s arguments to prove their eugenic theories, e.g. “politics is applied biology.” There is, however, one very important idea in recapitulationism which we also find in Vygotsky, and that is the idea of development as differentiation.
- 8.
Despite the spelling, this probably refers not to N.A. Severtsev, a Russian explorer who died in 1885, but rather to Alexei Nikoayevich Severtsov (Aлeкcéй Hикoлáeвич Céвepцoв, 1866–1936) who founded evolutionary morphology. He believed that organs were multifunctional, and therefore could be exapted (e.g. a swim bladder in a fish could be exapted into a lung in a land animal, and lungs, throat and tongue could be exapted in humans for speech). This allowed evolution to change course. It is obviously relevant to Vygotsky’s ideas of higher (cultural) psychological functions.
- 9.
Arthur Milnes Marshall (1852–1893) was a British zoologist who taught at Owens College, later Victoria University, in Manchester. He described the morphology of vertebrates, and was, like Vygotsky, a vigorous critic of Haeckel.
- 10.
Vygotsky is quoting from Piaget’s 1927 article “La première année de l’enfant” in the British Journal of Psychology, XVIII, p. 101. Piaget argues that the baby is a being whose desires are limitless, and coterminous with its consciousness. Piaget actually reproaches Freud with forgetting that the baby does not yet have an ego.
- 11.
Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974) was an associate professor and researcher in pedology at the University of Vienna in the early thirties. She was the student of Edmund Husserl and Oswald Külpe and the supervisor of Hildegard Hetzer and Beatrice Tudor-Hart. She was also the wife of Karl Bühler. Charlotte established that intentionality arises in infancy, and also developed the “autobiographical” method of studying adolescent diaries in order to understand the Crisis at Thirteen.
She was Jewish and Karl was strongly anti-Nazi, so they left Austria after the Anschluss and settled in the USA, where Charlotte influenced psychologists like Carl Rogers, Frits Perl and Abraham Maslow, and became one of the founders of the humanistic school of psychology which is still the mainstay of child development studies there.
- 12.
This is a reference to Groos (1912). See the references at the end of the chapter.
Reference
Groos, K. (1912). The play of man. Appleton and Co.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2022). A Short Overview of the Major Epochs in Child Development. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 3. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2972-4_3
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