8 Childhood: 2-12 Years
Dr Jay Seitz
Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood
and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows
or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,
you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows
something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous
that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.
– Lisel Mueller (“Sometimes, When the Light”; 1924-2020; National Book Award, 1981; Pulitzer Prize, 1997)
TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC)
- Mind and culture
- The emergence of the creative mind
- The centrality of schooling
- Emotions and interactions with others
Introduction
One school of psychology associated with the pioneering work of Alexander Luria demonstrated that human nature was the result of social and cultural processes. Luria (1902-1977) was the founder of the field of neuropsychology and placed emphasis on multiculturalism, which seeped into the evolving field of cross-cultural psychology. Whereas cross-cultural psychology looks at the similarities of humans across cultures worldwide, an even newer field, cultural psychology, looks at how culture shapes our psychology and belief systems and how this varies across the world.
Of course, cultural knowledge changes over time and Luria argued that we must examine cognitive processes (“thinking”) in particular historical periods or cultural contexts.
Luria was heavily influenced by one of his instructors, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), barely his senior. Vygotsky believed that thinking was shaped by language and various cultural “tools.” Thought, according to Vygotsky, was a creation of mediated activity and occurs through both interpersonal interaction with others as well as interaction with objects (such as a pen and paper). Literacy–whether numerical or linguistic–can be said to “mediate” culture because such mediation is a key to human development and occurs in bringing the outside (culture) to the inside (mind/brain).
Vygotsky introduced the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which refers to the gap between a child’s current level of development and the level they are capable of reaching with tools provided by adults. He viewed play as a crucial aspect of children’s development in which the child learns about mediated tools (such as sand, a pail, and a scoop).
Nonetheless, there is no evidence that literacy creates the capacity for abstract thought and reasoning, in and of itself. For instance, writing leads rather to certain forms of “context-dependent thought” such as textual understanding, written logic, and writing and the ability to distinguish what is said, from what is meant.
By the 1930s, Alexander Luria began to study peasant families in Central Asia during the midst of a cultural revolution in the USSR, which had as its goals the elimination of illiteracy, the restructuring of the economy, and the industr