Lev Vygotsky

Soviet psychologist (1896–1934) who argued that the higher mental functions are social before they are individual, and who did nearly all of the work he is known for in the last ten years of a life ended by tuberculosis at thirty-seven. Born in Orsha and raised in Gomel, he studied law in Moscow while attending lectures in literature and philosophy, taught in provincial schools, and wrote a dissertation on Hamlet and on the psychology of art before a paper delivered in Leningrad in 1924 brought him into the Moscow Institute of Psychology, where he worked with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev on what they called the cultural-historical theory.

Its central proposition is that every higher function appears twice: first between people, as a shared activity, and only afterwards inside the child, as an internal process — attention, memory and reasoning being reorganised as the child takes over the signs, above all language, that others have used to direct them. From this came the analysis of egocentric speech as speech on its way inward rather than a residue of infancy, developed against Piaget in Thought and Language (1934); the notion of mediation by psychological tools; and the zone of proximal development, the distance between what a child can do alone and what the same child can do with help, which he proposed as the measure that matters for teaching and which has since reshaped educational practice far beyond Russia.

He also founded Soviet defectology, the education of blind, deaf and intellectually disabled children, insisting that their development is not a reduced version of the ordinary one but a differently organised whole. His work was suppressed in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1956 and reached the West only with the 1962 translation of Thought and Language.