Classroom Education and the Development of Units of Verbal Thinking: Interpreting the Results of Comparative Experimental Studies of People Who Did or Did Not Attend School

Abstract This article discusses the performance of adults who did and did not attend school in experiments involving the definition of concepts, the finding of word-pair similarities, classification, and language objectivation. Most of the differences described correspond to the differences between every day and scientific concepts identified by L.S. Vygotsky. The existing data are insufficient to determine whether all the qualitative differences listed by Vygotsky exist between units of verbal thinking in those who did and did not attend school. In some cases, the thinking of people who did not attend school exhibits features that, according to Vygotsky, should emerge only in school with the assimilation of scientific knowledge (language objectivation and the “super-empirical” connections between concepts).