In the early twentieth century, after the socialist revolutions, a new psychological current was born in the context of opposition to American capitalism, and one of the first problems to be solved was finding a new education that responded to demands. this Soviet psychology and the creators of this revolutionary education were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev.
For these psychologists, education was a central theme: an essential tool of the revolution that began to be passed on to later generations; Today Soviet studies are considered studies of high scientific rigor and precursors of a revolutionary education. , we will discuss the thinking of these psychologists, based on their ideas of communication, development and educational goals.
- The first problem they observed in the education of their time was the poverty of existing communication.
- They realized that students were taxable subjects in the learning situation.
- As a result of the communication being one-way.
- From one teacher to another.
- In a teacher who sought to pass on their knowledge to students and they would assimilate these notions without asking questions.
Soviet psychology came to break this, sought a constructivist education, in this model students are the ones who acquire knowledge and are subjects of active learning, so the one-way communication model was incompatible, for students to build their ideas, It was necessary to transform the classroom into a space of debate. Communication should be given freely between the student-student and the student-teacher, with both parties willing to speak and listen.
The role of the teacher in this class would not be to communicate his masterful knowledge, in this model your goal would be to guide the debate among students to promote a good construction of learning in them, an extremely complex task. However, it has been proven on several occasions that when learning is active, the quality of teaching increases considerably.
Another fundamental problem they observed was the clarification of the relationship between learning and development, the foundations of this principle were laid by Vygotsky with his so-called Imminent Development Zone (IDF), Vygotsky found it absurd to talk about learning regardless of the cognitive development of the individual. He laid out a theory in which development preset learning and learning preset development, thus creating a development-learning-development cycle.
But what exactly is ZDI? Before delving into this concept, we must understand that everyone has two skill levels: (a) the level of competence he achieves on his own and (b) the skill he acquires with the support of a tutor. a student can solve a number of mathematical problems on their own, but if guided by the teacher, the same student will be able to solve more complex problems.
Therefore, ZDI would be the difference between what the individual is able to do with less support than he is able to do alone, this concept offers a potential area of development in which everyone can work. According to Vygotsky, the mission of training is to transform these ZDI skills into skills that the person can apply at the same level, without help, when this happens, the individual will develop a new ZDI, in which he will continue to progress, thus creating continuous development-learning-development.
Here we face one of the key questions of this revolutionary education: what is the true purpose of education?Before responding, Soviet psychologists looked at reality and realized that the goal of education was far from developing the potential of students.
They concluded that the educational mission of their day was to turn people into jobs for the jobs demanded by the market, i. e. to create a division of labour and a direct education so that people who transit it can fill vacancies in that division of labour. Today, with some nuances and exceptions, we can observe the same objective in our education system.
This new psychological current has sought to break with this dynamic, thinking that every individual should have the opportunity to develop their maximum intellectual potential, not to mention that he needs workers to run the company, so he believed that the ideal was for students to participate directly in economic and social life, periodically leaving school to devote themselves to the work necessary to maintain society.
Currently, we can see that there are not many differences between the system with which these psychologists were struggling and the current one, today we find that in most classrooms communication is still one-way and we are far from trying to explore each student’s ZDI. The revolutionary education proposed by Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev failed, but why?This is because the purpose of education is not yet the development of human potential. Our education system seeks to produce workers, just as an industry produces any other type of product.
If we really want to evolve as a society, education is a fundamental factor and as long as we have an educational model that doesn’t care about everyone’s development, we won’t be able to move forward, but what can we do to solve it?big problem This is the question we need to answer through the scientific study of education and society.