Vygotsky

Would Vygotsky agree that young children are essentially egocentric? Vygotsky started studying children around the same time as Piaget, but Vygotsky’s understanding only borrowed from Piaget. For example, in the simplest terms, Piaget believed that children were egocentric because they appeared to have very little interest in the people around them when they played. Vygotsky, on the other hand, believed differently. He believed that children were using egocentric speech, but were not essentially egocentric. In an article on Vygotsky’s theory, Blunden quotes Vygotsky, “…the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” (Blunden, 1997 ) Believing that the child is taking information and using it to understand the surrounding world, would suggest that the child is a part of a larger system, and not simply and individual. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), by Vygotsky was one way that Vygotsky allowed for understanding of how children learned from people other than themselves. Children learn through thought and speech. The child uses egocentric speech to help understand their environment at first, but this speech fades away to internal speech, or thoughts, used to guide any further learning. This is in contradiction to Piaget’s view of the egocentric speech as a Pre-operational stage where the stage is replaced by a Concrete operational stage. The child, to control impulses and behaviour, uses this internal dialogue as a social functioning tool. These two characteristics of internal speech would, in fact, state that Vygotsky does not believe that children are essentially egocentric.

References:

Blunden, Andy, (1997), Vygotsky and the Dialectical Method. Retrieved October 15, 2006, from http://gfdl.marxists.org.uk/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm