IN PRAISE OF- DIFFERENCE NINETEEN ninety-four is the 60th anniversary of the death of L. S. Vygotsky, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century. He was born into a prosperous Jewish family near Minsk in 1896. Despite the antisemitism of tsarist Russia, he had an escellent education and graduated from Moscow University in 1917, having studied law and literature. From 1917 to 1923, he taught in a school, and began his systematic work in psychology only in 1924. In the decade preceding his premature death from tuberculosis in 1934, he accomplished a staggering amount. He undertook medical training, established a research institute, wrote more than 160 books and papers and had a profound effect on the education of the disabled and handicapped. To describe him as a genius is not to esaggerate.

Vygotsky's work was little known in the West until the publication in translation of a small book' that presents his highly original theory of intellectual development, which is at the same time a theory of education. The reasons why Vygotsky's ideas failed to penetrate to the West no doubt reflect the language barrier, but the ideological divide which has existed for most of the century between East and West also played its part, as did his fall from grace in the eyes of his Soviet masters and the consequent suppression of his work. Only now, following the 'second Russian revolution', are we discovering more of Vygotsky's ideas?, and his work on the development of disabled childrenJ.

Following the revolution and civil war in Russia there were enormous numbers of homeless and abandoned children, and children suffering from physical and psychological disabilities and handicaps. Vygotsky was especially interested in these children and played an important part in the development of Soviet special education following the revolution. He established a laboratory for the study of the disabled, and later was one of the founders of the Institute of Defectology. (The name grates on our Western ears in the last decade of the century, but it was not a title which carried prejudice or stigma.)

Vygotsky brought a new understanding and approach to the psychological problems of disabled children. He believed that the fundamental laws governing the development of normal and disabled children were the same. Mind or higher psychological functions, he argued, came not from internal sources alone but from interaction with the sociocultural world of the child. A child from a socially or culturally deprived environment (which is often a consequence of disability)

v, A

941

may not be exposed to those more complex forms of experience necessary to facilitate mental development. Consequently, the child is seen as retarded when by means of alternative creative paths of development he could reach a much higher level. An individual, Vygotsky believed, is at any given moment full of unrealised opportunities. The outcome depends on the extent to which a person can internalise the culture. Indeed, it is precisely because disability impedes development that a disabled child can be stimulated to develop strengths which would otherwise remain unrealised. In this way, a child can rise above the primary deficiency; the story of Helen Keller is a dramatic example of a disability being transformed into a drive which ensured development.

For Vygotsky, language is central to development. Linguistic tools and signs are what is important, not the precise symbolic system as such-what matters is being in contact with means of internalising the sociocultural world. A child whose development is impeded by a deficit is not less developed than his or her peers, but rather developed differerztly. Disability may present obstacles and create limitations, but it also stimulates compensatory processes. Handicapped children are different because the psychological tools on which they can rely are different and the fate of each child is decided not by his or her defect or deficit but by the residual strengths which are available. The task of an educational programme or a school is to foster skills for living, to support social behaviour, and to encourage initiative, leadership and collective responsibility. It follows that dependency and a psychological climate in which the individual is treated as an invalid should be avoided because they are deeply antipathetic to the main goals. Compensation is not simply a matter of substituting one process with another: it entails a complex restructuring of an individual’s psychological activity so that the primary deficit is submerged in a new superstructure created by the second line of development.

Each child’s resources and strengths must be the deciding factors in establishing an educational programme. All too often the emphasis of our particular analytical framework has led to an assessment and tabulation of a child’s weaknesses which are then used to make decisions about placement in the educational system. We would do better to look for talents and strengths, and recognise that these will be different for different children. It is not uncommon to hear the parents of a disabled child say, ‘I wish my child was like other children’. But the differences are important from a positive standpoint. Differences offer hope because they provide the possibility of alternative routes for development, education and personal fulfilment. All too often differences have been ignored, their existence even suppressed. We should rejoice in them and capitalise on them. They are, after all, the very stuff of life.

.

KEVIN CONNOLLY

References 1 . Vygolsky, L . S. (1962) Thought arid Langitage. Cambridge, M A : M l f Press. 2. Kozulin, A. (1990) Vygofsky’s fsycbo1og.v: a Bibliogrupby of Idem New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 3. Newman. F., Holzman, L. (1993) Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scient/st. London: Routledge. 4. Rieber, R. W., Carton, A. S. (Eds.) (1993) Collected Works of L. S. Vvgotsky, Pol. 1. Tbe Fitndanienrals

of Defecrology. New York: Plenum Press.

942