Vygotsky and Sociology

Harry Daniels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415678216
• eBook ISBN: 9781136284946
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Building on earlier publications by Harry Daniels, Vygotsky and Sociology provides readers with an overview of the implications for research of the theoretical work which acknowledges a debt to the writings of L.S. Vygotsky and sociologists whose work echoes his sociogenetic commitments, particularly Basil Bernstein. It provides a variety of views on the ways in which these two, conceptually linked, bodies of work can be brought together in theoretical frameworks which give new possibilities for empirical work. This book has two aims. First, to expand and enrich the Vygotskian theoretical framework; second, to illustrate the utility of such enhanced sociological imaginations and how they may be of value in researching learning in institutions and classrooms.

It includes contributions from long-established writers in education, psychology and sociology, as well as relatively recent contributors to the theoretical debates and the body of research to which it has given rise, presenting their own arguments and justifications for forging links between particular theoretical traditions and, in some cases, applying new insights to obdurate empirical questions.

Chapters include:

• Curriculum and pedagogy in the sociology of education; some lessons from comparing Durkheim and Vygotsky
• Dialectics, politics and contemporary cultural-historical research, exemplified through Marx and Vygotsky
• Sixth sense, second nature and other cultural ways of making sense of our surroundings: Vygotsky, Bernstein, and the languaged body
• Negotiating pedagogic dilemmas in non-traditional educational contexts
• Boys, skills and class: educational failure or community survival? Insights from Vygotsky and Bernstein.

Vygotsky and Sociology is an essential text for students and academics in the social sciences (particularly sociology and psychology), student teachers, teacher educators and researchers as well as educational professionals.

1 Curriculum and pedagogy in the sociology of education

Some lessons from comparing Durkheim and Vygotsky

Michael Young

the rules of classic art teach us by their arbitrary nature that the thoughts arising from our daily needs, sentiments and experiences are only a small part of the thoughts of which we are capable.

(Paul Valéry, 1941)

Introduction

The distinction between curriculum and pedagogy in educational studies has a long history and has some parallels with the equally well-known distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ in social theory (Giddens, 1986). Both can be seen as a dividing line between the approaches to education adopted by Durkheim and Vygotsky, at least in how their ideas have been developed and used. My starting point takes a rather different and — I hope — more productive approach. It argues that, despite many ‘mainstream’ claims in their respective disciplines (sociology and psychology) Durkheim and Vygotsky were both, in the broad sense of the term, social epistemologists, interested in knowledge and the curriculum, and pedagogic theorists, interested in classroom practice. At the same time it would be misleading to claim that each did not emphasise the problems that were given priority by the other. Both were distinctive and in advance of their time in developing explicitly social theories of knowledge, although their respective approaches were very different. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on their social theories of knowledge, and the implications of the differences between them both for the sociology of education, and educational research generally. In relation to Vygotsky, the lack of attention to his theory of knowledge in the literature is noticeable. This no doubt reflects the fact that, despite the broad philosophical basis of his work, his ideas have been largely been taken up by psychologists. Thanks to the work of two philosophers, Derry (2003) and Bakhurst (2011), we now have a much fuller and more rounded view of the importance of epistemological issues in Vygotsky's work.

This chapter is a revised version of ch. 4 of Bringing Knowledge Back in: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).

Durkheim, in contrast, has long been recognised as a sociologist of knowledge. However, the polemical style of some of his works¹ — he saw himself as an advocate of the reality of the ‘social’ sui generis as well as an analyst — and the fact that he did not explicitly refer to his theory of knowledge in his writings on education has meant that only recently has this been recognized as central to his educational theories Moore (2004), Young and Muller (2007).

Despite their different disciplinary origins, the two writers under discussion share two assumptions that were basic to their ideas about education. First is the idea that knowledge is not located ‘in the mind’ or in the material or experiential world. Both Durkheim and Vygotsky see knowledge as the outcome of men and women acting together on the world. In other words, both had an unambiguously social theory of knowledge. Secondly both recognized that the acquisition and transmission of knowledge is central to education. This does not of course mean, as some have supposed, that either relied on a mechanical or one-way metaphor of transmission. For Durkheim, as Paul Fauconnet says in his introduction to Durkheim's Education and Sociology ‘the transmission [of knowledge] through the teacher to the pupil (or conversely) the assimilation by the child of a subject, seemed to him [Durkheim] to be the condition of real intellectual formation … Forms [of the mind] cannot be transmitted empty. Durkheim, like Comte, thinks that it is necessary to learn about things, to acquire knowledge’ (1956:). Vygotsky expresses the crucial role of knowledge transmission slightly less directly in the way that he sees pedagogy as integral to a child engaging with ‘theoretical’ concepts and developing ‘higher forms of thought’.

While neither Vygotsky or Durkheim offer a fully satisfactory social theory of knowledge, both raise the issue of knowledge as an educational issue in ways that most sociology of education and educational studies have ignored. More space in this chapter is given to Durkheim's work than that of Vygotsky. This is partly, because, as a sociologist, I am more familiar with Durkheim's work and partly because the issue of knowledge is at the centre of Durkheim's social theory and only indirectly addressed by Vygotsky.

By beginning with the similarities between Durkheim's and Vygotsky's approaches, my argument will be that while both can be understood as adopting a social realist approach to knowledge,² the ways that they conceptualized social reality were very different. One way of making a clear contrast between the two ‘social realists’ is that central to Durkheim's theory of knowledge is the idea of ‘social structure’, whereas Vygotsky's theory relies on the idea of ‘social activity’.³ I will return to the concepts ‘social structure’ and ‘social activity’ later in the chapter.

Section 2 outlines Durkheim's theory of knowledge and the problems that arise from his concept of ‘social structure’ and its neglect of the dimension of social activity. It draws on both his early anthropological work (Durkheim, 1912/1965; Durkheim and Mauss, 1970), and his later lectures on the pragmatism of William James (Durkheim, 1984).

Section 3 describes Vygotsky's social activity-based theory of knowledge and how it emphasizes just those issues that Durkheim neglects. It notes that Vygotsky's emphasis on ‘social activity’ appears to preclude him from treating knowledge as something that can be conceptualized as separate from its uses. The importance of being able to separate knowledge from its uses is of course Durkheim's key point in his critique of pragmatism (Durkheim, 1984), and has profound implications for his approach to the curriculum. Section 4 explores the contrasts between Durkheim and Vygotsky's theories in more detail and develops more fully the analytical distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘activity’. Section 5 turns to some issues raised by the leading English Durkheimian, Basil Bernstein. Although I focus largely on Bernstein's last book (Bernstein, 2000), his ideas about educational knowledge can be traced back to his earliest papers on the curriculum (Bernstein, 1971). I show how both the strengths and some of the problems with Durkheim's approach re-emerge in Bernstein's more developed theory of educational knowledge. Section 6 traces some of the ways in which Vygotsky's ideas have been developed, especially by the Finnish socio-cultural theorist, Yrjö Engeström, and how Engeström's approach highlights the problems that an activity-based theory of knowledge can lead to. I conclude by suggesting some of the educational implications of the distinction between structure-based and activity-based approaches to knowledge and the lessons contemporary researchers can learn from the Vygotsky-Durkheim comparison.

Despite being located within the different disciplinary traditions of sociology and psychology, and living and working in contexts as different as pre-First World War France and post-revolutionary Russia, Durkheim and Vygotsky had much in common as social theorists and educational thinkers. Both had social theories of knowledge that were closely related to their ideas about education. This point about Vygotsky having a social theory of knowledge is especially significant as it has been largely neglected in the psychologically oriented tradition of activity theory that has built on his work. Both shared a fundamentally evolutionary approach to knowledge and human development that was common to most progressive intellectuals in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both held differentiated theories of knowledge; they recognized that knowledge is not a seamless web — that theoretical or context-independent knowledge and everyday or context-bound knowledges have different structures and different purposes. Both saw formal education as the main source of, and condition for, people to acquire the capacity for generalization, and both recognized that the acquisition of context-independent or theoretical knowledge was the main, albeit not the only, goal of formal education.

On the other hand, Durkheim and Vygotsky differed both on the aspects of human development that they saw as fundamental, and how they conceptualized the ‘social’ in their theories of mind and knowledge. It is also relevant that Durkheim had a far greater concern with education's integrative role in a society. This is not surprising when, as in the France of his time, the old religious bonds were weakening and when new, for Durkheim ‘amoral’ forms of economic activity that threatened the integrity of society, were expanding. In contrast, Vygotsky was living in a society in which a new concept of man — socialist man — was being created. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they had different ideas about the social character of knowledge. Both recognized that human beings are social in ways that have no equivalent among animals. Both interpreted man's social relations as fundamentally pedagogic. In other words, both saw that it is through the ability of human beings not just to adapt to their environment like animals but to develop in response to pedagogy, especially but not only when they are young, that they become members of societies and create knowledge beyond anything previous generations could conceive of. It was for these reasons, that unlike later sociology and psychology of education, both saw education and integral to the social (and in Vygotsky's case, development) theories and vice versa. They differed, however, in how they interpreted the origins of this fundamental human sociality. Although both were creatures of the Enlightenment and believed in the progressive possibilities of science, Durkheim tended to look backwards for the foundations of knowledge and equate them with sources of social stability, whereas Vygotsky's more activist approach looked forward to men and women's capacities for developing higher forms of thought and creating a socialist society. Before exploring the implications of these differences, the next two sections focus separately and in more detail on Durkheim and Vygotsky's ideas.

Durkheim's theory of knowledge

For Durkheim, the fundamental sociality of human beings is the basis of his social theory of knowledge; everything that is human is social for Durkheim. Human society, he argued, originated in the collective relations found in the most primitive societies (the clan system in those he studied). For Durkheim, the sociality of early human beings was expressed in their membership of clans and the social identity this gave them. It was through their ability to distinguish clans (and learn that one was a member of one and not the others) that Durkheim and Mauss (1970) located the origins of logic (the grouping of things into discrete categories). Durkheim argued that totems associated with primitive religions (usually an animal, a bird or a fish) were collective representations which defined what clan someone was in (and therefore who they were). He built his social theory of the foundations of knowledge on his account of totemic religion and it was from this starting point that he developed his distinction between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’. In laying the social foundations of logic without which no other knowledge is possible, Durkheim described these primitive forms of totemic religion as a kind of proto-science.

He set out to show that, despite being experienced by members of primitive societies (and described by anthropologists) as religious beliefs and practices, the collective representations which emerged from and constituted the clan structures are, in form at least, remarkably like the ideas of modern logic. He is, it can be argued, inverting the dominant rationalism of his time which assumed that logical ideas are innate or ‘in the mind’. As he and Mauss put it:

(it is not) that the social relations of men are based on the logical relations between things, in reality, it is the former which have provided the prototype for the latter … men classified things because they were divided into clans. (Durkheim and Mauss, 1970: 82)

Social scientists keep returning to Durkheim's ideas a century later, not because subsequent ethnographical evidence supports them (often it does not) but because, almost uniquely, he offers a convincing sociological account of the most basic categories of human thought (or, as he put it, of the foundations of knowledge). The power, objectivity and generality of knowledge are, for Durkheim, located in the generality of society for its members. Furthermore, in making a distinction between the totemic classifications which hold primitive societies together, and what he and Mauss refer to as the ‘technological classifications that [merely] reflect usage’, Durkheim is suggesting how we might develop a social theory of the origins of our most fundamental categories that we largely take for granted such as ‘analytical’ and ‘descriptive’, ‘theoretical’ and ‘everyday’, and ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. In other words he is offering us the basis for a social theory of the differentiation of knowledge. His social theory of knowledge is therefore also the basis for a theory of the curriculum; it implies a set of principles for the selection of curriculum knowledge. This is a point that I will return to.

In a footnote to their book Primitive Classifications, Durkheim and Mauss make a clear distinction between their idea of social classifications and the ways that members of primitive societies classify what Durkheim and Mauss refer to as:

the things on which they lived according to the means they used to get them. (1970: 81)

They saw the latter type of classification as ‘mere divisions … and not schemes of classification’ (ibid.; my italics).

Why did Durkheim make such a sharp distinction between religious or totemic classifications and what he referred to as technological (or practical/useful) classifications? My view is that this distinction is fundamental to his theory of knowledge and his theory of society, which are in a sense the same. This point needs some elaboration. Furthermore, his tendency to elide the sociological meanings that he gives to religion, knowledge and society, points also to some problems with his approach. Firstly, it is arguable that his whole theory of knowledge collapses if the reason for making the distinction between ‘social’ and ‘technological’ classifications is not accepted. The case that he makes for the social basis of knowledge assumes that the clans of which primitive men and women were members and the collective rituals that sustained them had an epistemological priority over any other forms of social grouping or relations that they may have been involved in — almost a kind of anti-materialist doctrine. Secondly, despite his criticisms of Kant, Durkheim was at heart a rationalist, who accepted the idea that reason (and its specification as logic) was the unique quality that made people human (and different from other animals); the activities they engaged in to survive did not distinguish them from animals; they also had to survive! Reason was also, for Durkheim, the basis of our objectively true knowledge of the world, and hence it was the foundation of science. On the other hand, Durkheim was deeply dissatisfied with the accounts of the origins of human reason that were prevalent in his time. These, and the problems with them that he identified, can be summarized briefly in the following very schematic terms:

1 Rational...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Vygotsky and Sociology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• A brief introduction
• 1 Curriculum and pedagogy in the sociology of education: some lessons from comparing Durkheim and Vygotsky
• 2 Dialectics, politics and contemporary cultural-historical research, exemplified through Marx and Vygotsky
• 3 Vygotsky and Bernstein
• 4 Sixth sense, second nature, and other cultural ways of making sense of our surroundings: Vygotsky, Bernstein, and the languaged body
• 5 The concept of semiotic mediation: perspectives from Bernstein's sociology
• 6 Negotiating pedagogic dilemmas in non-traditional educational contexts: an Australian case study of teachers' work
• 7 Modalities of authority and the socialisation of the school in contemporary approaches to educational change
• 8 Semiotic mediation, viewed over time
• 9 Boys, skills and class: educational failure or community survival? Insights from Vygotsky and Bernstein
• 10 'Identity' as a unit of analysis in researching and teaching mathematics
• 11 Schooling the social classes: triadic zones of proximal development, communicative capital, and relational distance in the perpetuation of advantage
• 12 The pedagogies of second language acquisition: combining cultural-historical and sociological traditions
• Index