Soviet Psychology

ISSN: 0038-5751 (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mrpo19

Introduction: The Kharkov School of

Developmental Psychology

Michael Cole

To cite this article: Michael Cole (1979) Introduction: The Kharkov School of Developmental
Psychology, Soviet Psychology, 18:2, 3-8

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-040518023

Published online: 19 Dec 2014.

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 INTRODUCTION :
THE KHARKOV SCHOOL OF
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

The a rt i c l e s in this issue of Soviet Psychology were provided

through the kindness of Alexander V. Zaporozhets, P r o f e s s o r
Emeritus of Psychology at Moscow University and Director of
the Institute of Preschool Education of the USSR. The originals
were published in Ukrainian; except in secondary s o u rces, they
have never appeared in another language, not even Russian.
My interest in this work grew out of r e s e a r c h into the history
of the group of Soviet s c hol a r s who sought to develop the ideas
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of L. S. Vygotsky r e f e r r e d to as the "sociocultural theory of

mind." Vygotsky (1962, 1978) laid the foundation for this work,
but did not live to see a full-fledged psychological s y s tem based
on empirical observation growing out of theoretical propositions.
I learned during conversations with Alexander Luria that for a
brief period of time, the group around Vygotsky had considered
making Kharkov its intellectual home, a place away fro m the
hub of Soviet affairs in the 1930s where they could develop their
ideas. The leader of this group was A. N. Leont'ev, late Dean
of the Psychology Department at Moscow University. Vygotsky
and Luria a l so spent time in Kharkov. But it was Vygotsky's
younger students, under Leont'ev's direction, who formed the
core group: Zaporozhets and Bozhovich, fro m Moscow (Zaporo-
zhets is a Ukrainian who went to Moscow to study before re-
turning for a period to the Ukraine), Gal'perin, Asnin, P. I.
Zinchenko, and others they recruited inKharkov (see Cole, 1979).
The program of r e s e a r c h these people pursued is a n extension

3
 4 M. Cole

of work begun in Moscow in the late 1920s. The goal, a Marxist

science of mind, had been worked out programmatically by
Vygotsky, Luria, and Leont'ev; but only the barest empirical
data supported it at this early period. At the time of his death,
in 1934, Vygotsky had already developed a thorough critique of
Piaget's early theorizing; but except in the area of egocentric
speech, little original empirical work in the Piagetian problem-
solving mode existed.
In reading this work one should keep several relevant aspects
of historical context in mind. First, the move to Kharkov was
motivated in p a r t by the increasingly difficult circumstances
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surrounding work in Moscow. Beginning in 1929 and increasing

in intensity through about 1936, Vygotsky and his students were
subjected to increasingly heavy criticism for implications r e a d
into their work (with some justice, in my opinion, but not on
grounds equivalent to the censure they faced). Although highly
critical of IQ testing, Vygotsky was t a r r e d with the brush of a n
IQ tester because of his position, for a brief time, as director
of the Institute of Pedology (roughly, educational psychology),
from which rather crude r e s e a r c h using translated IQ t e s t s had
been launched. Luria was implicated in these problems because
of his r e s e a r c h in Central Asia in which he claimed to have
found qualitative changes in mental processes wrought by col-
lectivization, literacy training, and "modernization" more gen-
erally conceived. These are changes that Marxist theory pre-
dicts; as social relations change, mental life changes.
In 1936, in response to these and other events, the Central
Committee of the Communist Party issued a special decree
banning IQ testing. All recognized journal outlets for psycho-
logical r e s e a r c h were shut down; and according t o standard his-
tories of the era, psychology went into a period of severe de-
cline (Bauer, 1952).
As r e a d e r s of this journal a r e aware from previous issues,
the announcement of Soviet psychology's death in 1936 was m o r e
than a little overstated. Although it was true that the major ve-
hicles for publication were closed, r e s e a r c h continued; and re-
gional publications, o r publications in education o r medical
journals, persisted.
 Introduction 5

One such regional publication was the s o u r c e of the a r t i c l e s

presented here, the journal of the Kharkov School of Education.
As even a superficial reading of this work indicates, Leont'ev
and the young r e s e a r c h e r s who worked with him established a
good deal of distance between themselves and their f o r m e r
teacher Vygotsky. In fact, were it not for knowledge of the in-
dividual biographies, subsequent publications in which the con-
nections are made explicit (e.g., Zaporozhets & El'konin,
1971), and the fact that the arguments on which this work is
based are clearly stated by Vygotsky, it would be possible to
read these a r t i c l e s without e v e r realizing their overall theoret-
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ical and historical import. The only mention of Vygotsky (in

Asnin's interesting discussion of experimental methodology,
which will appear in a future issue of Soviet Psychology) is
-
highly c r i t i c a l and distorted as well.
Such is the historical background of these articles. What
about their content ?
Here, more clearly than in any other s o u r c e I know, we find
reasonably well worked out experimental models of the basic
Vygotskian theory of development. It is a model self-consciously
elaborated in opposition to Western European and American
psychology, but it is by no means a "negative effort." T h e r e is
a powerful and genuinely dialectical theory spelled out repeat-
edly in this s m a l l s e t of experiments.
Roughly speaking, the theory s a y s the following: Viewed at
any given time period, the child's mental p r o c e s s e s are the re-
sult of the history of his/her interactions with the social and
nonsocial environment, on the basis of which he/she has evolved
a large set of specific adaptations that operationalize relations
among objects (including people) that the child encounters. At
the s t a r t of the age period under discussion in this work (about
three to five y e a r s ) , the child has learned a good deal about the
properties of objects and events in the world and the objective
relations among them. But this information is limited because
the variety of experiences that the child h a s understood (in con-
t r a s t to something like t'experienced'') is relatively small. The
child's interactions with the world have occurred in the p r e s -
ence of adults in culturally organized forms. To the adults falls
 6 M. Cole

a good deal of the mental work of dealing with the environment

(here Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development,
not mentioned in this work, is very important). In any problem
domain (say, for example, problems concerning displacement
of water by objects) the child's experience is quite limited. Not
enough information and not enough variety of information have
been encountered to allow for very broad generalizations about
the properties of objects that are responsible for such facts as
that wood floats and copper sinks (unless, of course, the copper
is forced into a concave shape and placed properly on the water).
Basing their judgments on a limited number of attributes and
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relations of objects, children sometimes make c o r r e c t judg-

ments and sometimes incorrect judgments about the fate of an
object placed on the water. The "engine'' of change is experi-
ence, but experience of a very special kind. It is experience
that confronts the child with new information - a contradiction
s o long as the child has only the current, limited knowledge
about the objects involved in the problem domain.
For some time the child will remain a t what may be roughly
called a ''stage" of development with respect to that domain.
But within the stage, as experience accumulates, one sees a
kind of "lateral development." American learning theorists
would prefer to call this "generalization" o r "transfer" - that
is, the child comes to respond to a greater and greater variety
of objects and problem domains, using the products of learning
in the domain that got him/her into that stage in the first place.
In the examples in these papers, the child f i r s t makes c o r r e c t
judgments about a limited s e t of objects placed in/on water, but
e r r s when the problem s t r a y s beyond the current range of
known and understood attributes/relations. In order for any
change to occur, additional experiences, different from those
provided by the initial learning environment, are essential. A s
several of the authors point out, the range of potential generali-
zation is very great, and even adults may have insufficiently
generalized understandings of some problem domains that they
"understand" when the problems are presented in an appropri-
ate (familiar, already learned) context.
 Introduction 7

Change to the next stage of development (say, from what is

here termed visual-operational to visual-imagic) comes when
two conditions a r e fulfilled. First, there must be generalization
of the basis of problem solution to many exemplars. Second,
as a result of this generalization, the child (who now operates
at the f i r s t level for each exemplar) must be confronted with a
new contradiction that forces a new kind of generalization on the
basis of already familiar examples. This is referred to as "re-
organization" by these authors. It can also be referred to as
"abstraction," the development of a "learning set," and many other
terms popular in one o r another branch o r school of psychology.
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What s e t s this work off from related theories with which I am

familiar is the insistence on continuing interaction with the en-
vironment in which the child is constantly encountering more
examples "of the same kind" but in new contexts (presumably
arranged by the social environment), i n which new contradic-
tions a r e posed and new, higher-order generalizations (or
stages of development, s o r t of) a r e possible.
I hedge the notion of stages in this approach because, in an
important sense, a stage is not likely to be characteristic of the
whole of a child's (or adult's) functioning. Rather, stages a r e
certain to be content-specific to the degree that the conditions
of a person's life limit contradiction- and knowledge-producing
experiences that allow the lateral generalization necessary to
make development appear general and to provide the basis upon
which more sophisticated information processing can be built.
Although I have given only a crude sketch of the Kharkov
school's overall theory of development, it should quickly be
clear that this is a serious proposal. I do not believe that all
of the comments on Piaget's work a r e justified (it should be re-
called that only The language and thought of the child was avail-
able in the USSR a t that time). But the basic contention that in-
teraction was not adequately treated in his work is certainly
true. It is in that context, and in these authors' theory of de-
velopmental change, that this work takes on its greatest con-
temporary relevance.
Aside from its general implications, this research is a rich
 8 M. Cole

source of ingenious ideas and techniques. Some r e a d e r s will

especially appreciate the clever demonstrations of how tacit
understandings of the nature of the experimental context influ-
ence children's behavior. Others will point to the very early
anticipation of Piaget's work on constructive remembering o r
the acute discussions of learning in the classroom. From what-
e v e r perspective one views it, there is a great deal to be found
in this long-forgotten material.

References
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Bauer, R. A. (1952) The new man in Soviet psychology. Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Cole, M. (1979) A portrait of Luria. In A. R. Luria, The making
of mind. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press.
Pp. 182-228.
El'konin, D., & Zaporozhets, A. V . (Eds.) (1971) The psychology
of preschool children. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
Luria, A. R . (1979) Op. cit.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962) Thought and language. Cambridge,
Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.

Michael Cole
Editor