Orsha and Gomel
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born on November 17, 1896, in the town of Orsha in the Mogilev province of the Russian Empire, now in Belarus. He was registered at birth as Lev Simkhovich Vygodsky; the patronymic and the spelling of the surname were later changed, for reasons that are not clear. His family was Jewish, middle class and not religious. His father, Simkha Leibovich, also known as Semyon Lvovich, was a banker; his mother was Tsetsilia Moiseevna.
Vygotsky grew up in Gomel, a city with a large Jewish population inside the Pale of Settlement, the region where most Jews of the Russian Empire were required to live. He was taught at home until 1911, then finished his secondary education with distinction at a private Jewish gymnasium. From his youth he was drawn to literature, art and philosophy, and he admired the seventeenth-century Jewish-born philosopher Baruch Spinoza; in his dissertation he wrote that his intellect had been shaped by Spinoza’s resolve not to be astonished, laugh or cry, but to understand.
The Jewish lottery
In 1913 Vygotsky won a place at Moscow University, not on merit alone but by ballot. At that time the tsarist government limited Jewish students at the universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg to three percent of places, and Jewish applicants who qualified were chosen by lottery. His parents wanted him to study medicine, and he enrolled in the medical school, but in his first semester he transferred to law. At the same time he attended lectures in history, philosophy and psychology at the Shanyavsky Moscow City People’s University, an independent private university.
The years of revolution and civil war brought him back to Gomel. There he taught literature and psychology at local schools and colleges, and from 1922 to 1924 ran a psychological laboratory he had organised at the Gomel Pedagogical College. His lecture notes from these years became his book Pedagogical Psychology, published in 1926, and he completed a dissertation on the psychology of art, which was not published until the 1960s.
Moscow and the Vygotsky circle
In January 1924 Vygotsky gave a talk at the Second All-Russian Psychoneurological Congress in Petrograd that impressed a young psychologist named Alexander Luria. With Luria’s help he was invited to a research post at the Psychological Institute in Moscow, and he moved there that year. In 1924 he also married Roza Smekhova; they had two children, including a daughter, Gita, born in 1925.
In Moscow he quickly became the centre of a circle of brilliant young researchers, including Luria, Alexei Leontiev and Leonid Zankov. From 1926 to 1930 they worked on what Vygotsky called the higher psychological functions, the uniquely human abilities such as deliberate memory, voluntary attention, planning and reasoning in words. Over the following decade he wrote at astonishing speed, producing a large body of work on child development, language, play, art, education and the history and methods of psychology.
At the First All-Russian Pedological Congress, held over the winter of 1927 and 1928, Vygotsky and Luria presented their programme of what they called instrumental psychology, which studied how people use signs and tools, from knots tied as reminders to words, to master their own minds. A conflict with the institute’s director, Konstantin Kornilov, in December 1928 curtailed the group’s work there, but Vygotsky continued at other institutions in Moscow and beyond, lecturing tirelessly and supervising students.
Children with disabilities
From July 1924 Vygotsky headed a sub-department for the education of physically and intellectually disabled children, a field then called defectology. In the summer of 1925 he made his only trip abroad, to a conference in London on the education of deaf children. He later led psychological laboratories at the Experimental Defectological Institute in Moscow. In November 1924 he edited a collection of articles on the upbringing of blind, deaf and intellectually disabled children, published as Soviet special education officially turned toward social education, and in 1929 he set out his views in The Fundamental Problems of Defectology.
His approach was humane and, for its time, radical. Rather than seeing a disability simply as a deficit, he argued that the greater handicap often came from the social consequences of disability, from isolation and from education that set low expectations. He urged that blind, deaf and intellectually disabled children be educated socially, with others, and that teachers find alternative routes, such as other senses, signs and tools, through which they could develop. These ideas anticipated later movements for inclusive education and remain influential in special education.
Learning through others
At the heart of Vygotsky’s thinking is the idea that the mind develops through social life and culture. A child does not build understanding alone: abilities first appear in interaction with other people and are then taken inside, or internalised, to become the child’s own. Culture supplies the tools for this, above all language, along with number systems, writing and other signs, which change the way we think. In his last major book, Thinking and Speech, published in 1934, he traced how children’s speech, at first used socially and then spoken aloud to themselves, turns into the silent inner speech that guides adult thought. He also saw play, especially make-believe with its own rules, as a major force in children’s development.
His best-known idea is the zone of proximal development: the gap between what a child can do alone and what the same child can do with guidance from a more knowledgeable person, whether a teacher, a parent or a more capable classmate. Vygotsky argued that good teaching should aim at this zone, just ahead of the child’s current ability, rather than at skills already mastered. He also argued that intelligence tests measuring only what a child can do unaided miss the most important information: two children with the same score may differ greatly in what they can achieve with help.
Vygotsky never met his great Swiss contemporary Jean Piaget, but around 1929 and 1930 he engaged closely with his work. Piaget saw young children’s talk to themselves as a sign of egocentric thinking that fades away; Vygotsky argued instead that this private speech is a tool children use to guide their own actions, and that it goes underground to become inner speech. Writing about play, he described it as containing all developmental tendencies in a condensed form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, and as itself a major source of development.
Illness, early death and suppression
Vygotsky suffered from tuberculosis for much of his adult life. He was hospitalised from November 1925 to May 1926 and remained an invalid until the end of that year, yet he continued to work feverishly. He died of a relapse of the disease in Moscow on June 11, 1934, at the age of 37, leaving many manuscripts unfinished. His ashes were buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Soon after his death, his work fell victim to Stalinist politics. In 1936 the Communist Party condemned pedology, the science of child development to which much of his research belonged, and during the Great Purge his theories came to be treated as heresy. His books were effectively banned in the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death in 1953. A small group of his former collaborators, among them Luria, Leontiev, Alexander Zaporozhets and Daniil Elkonin, kept his lines of research alive, and the first collection of his major writings appeared in 1956.
Rediscovered in the West
Few of Vygotsky’s writings reached English readers until Thought and Language, a translation of Thinking and Speech, was published in 1962. The American psychologist Michael Cole was among his first champions in the United States, and in 1978 Harvard University Press published Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, a collection of his essays that made him famous among educators. A 2002 survey in the Review of General Psychology ranked him among the hundred most-cited psychologists of the twentieth century.
His ideas inspired a whole family of teaching methods. In 1976 the psychologists David Wood, Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross introduced the term scaffolding for the temporary support an adult gives a learner and gradually withdraws, a concept closely tied to Vygotsky’s zone, though he never used the word himself. Reciprocal teaching, in which students take turns leading small-group discussions of a text, cooperative learning in mixed-ability groups, guided practice and dynamic assessment, which measures what a learner can do with help, all draw on his work.
Jewish roots and legacy
Vygotsky came from a secular Jewish family, studied at a Jewish gymnasium, and owed his university education to a lottery imposed by antisemitic quotas. He lived through the end of the Pale of Settlement after the 1917 revolution, which opened universities and professions to Jews, and his own career and circle in Moscow were part of that opening.
Today his name is known to almost every trainee teacher in the world. When a teacher pairs a struggling reader with a stronger classmate, breaks a hard task into supported steps, or asks what a pupil can do with a hint rather than only what they can do alone, they are using ideas that Vygotsky worked out in Gomel and Moscow a century ago, in a life of only 37 years.
Sources & further reading
Lev Vygotsky, Wikipedia · Zone of proximal development, Wikipedia · Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development, Simply Psychology · Lev Vygotsky Archive, Marxists Internet Archive · Lev Vygotsky, Wikiquote · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.