Conclusion

Abstract

It is a banal fact of life that children at the beginning of their education need the help of adults. When dogmatic psychologists cite this truism and use Vygotsky’s term “interpsychological action,” they conjure up the illusion of understanding the phenomenon of the joint action. But in fact no one has yet answered the question of what the interpsychological action between a child and an adult is; what is its objectification; and how it differs from intrapsychological, totally individualized action. We have tried to answer these questions with regard to the initial stage of development of learning activity by early-grade schoolchildren. What do we mean when we say: a teacher is introducing a child into the realm of theoretical concepts; schoolchildren, with the teacher’s help, identify in the teaching material a certain basic relation, establish it in a symbolic form, etc. If a child entering a classroom were a tabula rasa, and the teacher were Pygmalion, then we could take the above literally. But the child, from the very first moment of interaction with a teacher, is active; in response to the teacher’s action he begins energetically to develop his own action. In the process children, of course, merely enter into the kind of relationship with the adult that they are already familiar with: a relationship of uncritical trust that they assimilated already in the infantile activities of direct, emotional interaction; a relationship of imitating models, which they assimilated in concrete, manipulative activities; and a role-playing relationship, which they assimilated in play. In these noneducational forms of responsive action by the child the theoretical content proffered by a teacher inevitably degenerates: in direct, emotional contacts all objectification is lost (except signs of mutual affection); in play-based relations the productivity of action disappears; and in imitative relationships the reflective content is eviscerated. Consequently, in order to transmit to children the conceptual content of educational activities, an adult must teach them a specific form of receiving this content—the form of educational collaboration. What is that?