The Concept of Pedological Age

Abstract

Vygotsky does not usually begin with a statement of his concept. The concept emerges from the research. But for Vygotsky, that research always includes a critical, dialectical, review of the history of the concept, where each iteration of the concept is good for some purposes but not for others and each researcher solves some of the problems of previous researchers but uncovers new problems for subsequent researchers to tackle.

Here, for example, Vygotsky notes that Alfred Binet saw the importance of history in development, but considered it a simple function of time. Arnold Gesell thought development looked more log-linear, slowing with growth, and that mental development followed physical development like a shadow. In contrast, William Louis Stern thought that periods of child development could be marked off by the appearance of new personality formations like space perception, time perception, color, length, depth, and understanding speech vs. producing it spontaneously, but he had no way of explaining the order of these neoformations. Vygotsky concludes the chapter with the suggestion that child development be periodized according to immanent cycles of self-movement and self-contradiction, of which the neoformations are the culmination.

This chapter is taken from material edited and published by G.S. Korotaeva in 2001.

Outline of Chapter 1: The Concept of Pedological Age

Vygotsky does not usually begin with a statement of his concept. The concept emerges from the research. But for Vygotsky, that research always includes a critical, dialectical, review of the history of the concept, where each iteration of the concept is good for some purposes but not for others and each researcher solves some of the problems of previous researchers but uncovers new problems for subsequent researchers to tackle.

Here, for example, Vygotsky notes that Alfred Binet saw the importance of history in development, but considered it a simple function of time. Arnold Gesell thought development looked more log-linear, slowing with growth, and that mental development followed physical development like a shadow. In contrast, William Louis Stern thought that periods of child development could be marked off by the appearance of new personality formations like space perception, time perception, color, length, depth, and understanding speech vs. producing it spontaneously, but he had no way of explaining the order of these neoformations. Vygotsky concludes the chapter with the suggestion that child development be periodized according to immanent cycles of self-movement and self-contradiction, of which the neoformations are the culmination.

Let us elaborate these four moments into a four-paragraph outline.

• I. Development takes time, but it is not a simple, linear function of time. Vygotsky says that even body weight, plotted on a graph, appears as a wave and not as a line. Moreover, the wavelength changes; the period required for, say, a 10% increase in body weight is not constant. So child development is characterized by periodicity—that is, by rhythms, cycles, or (since there is a clear progression toward complexity) an ascending spiral. Like the historical developments of which it is a distant echo (e.g., the invention of literacy, compulsory schooling, apprenticeships), child development does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

• II. Researchers believe that mental development follows growth. Gesell believes that personality development follows physical development, slowing with growing. Richter, Froebel, and even Tolstoy apparently believed that the most important lessons in life are learnt even before kindergarten . Vygotsky agrees that a year of physical development is never equal to any other year in physical development, and acknowledges that we might well expect that what is true for physical development might be equally true for psychological development.

• III. Some mental functions seem to precede others. Vygotsky says that development taken as a whole is a highly complex process, and its changes are qualitative as well as quantitative. Moreover, the means of development itself develops: some functions that were not central lines of development become central and others that were central lines of development become peripheral. Even in general-anatomical growth, the basic organs and basic functions mature quickly and rapidly, while higher organs and higher functions which require this base as a prerequisite necessarily develop later and more slowly. Stern, for example, claims that the child learns to deal with space before time, with length before depth, and with understanding speech before producing it. Vygotsky deduces from this the possibility of defining a pedological age period:

  • 1. By what comes before and after, and not by calendar time

  • 2. By its place in the overall process of development

  • 3. By general laws of development expressed in a way completely specific to child development

• IV. Some of the most important neoformations seem to be cultural and historical rather than merely biological and chronological in their origins and process. There is one sense in which child development really is like cultural-historical, and even biological and geological, development. Each stage can be characterized by the neoformations that arise in it (e.g., capitalism is characterized by the neoformation of capital, the age of reptiles is characterized by the neoformation of dinosaurs, and the Cambrian period by the neoformation of animal life in the fossil record). Each age period, then, is the history of the rise of a particular neoformation . Although the age periods of child development do not coincide with the calendar years of child age (any more than the periods of cultural history correspond to years BC or AD, or even dynasties of kings), there are nevertheless certain regularities in child development (just as there are in the progress of cultures).

Taken in bulk, these can be correlated to calendar years, so long as we understand the correlation as a statistical probability and not as a simple dependency . When we do this, we discover that age periods vary from one culture to another, which implies that at least some psychic neoformations realize cultural-historical developments (such as speech, literacy, and concept formation), rather than just biological developments (such as the myelinization of the brain cortex , teething, or sexual maturation). On the one hand, this suggests a certain objective similarity in the products of development, at least within a culture. So, for example, almost all children in a culture will learn speech and almost all children in a literate culture will become literate. On the other hand, this suggests uneven processes, because complexes of biological and cultural-historical development cannot possibly occur in lockstep. So, determining the real pedological age of each child and the next zone of development is both a group (objective) and an individual (subjective) task for the teacher.

Chapter 1: The Concept of Pedological Age

Child development is a historical process, one which flows through time. The link between the developmental level of the child and his age, that is, the number of years that have flowed by since the day of his birth, as well as the link between the process of development and the change in the age of the child, is so striking that in a certain sense we may consider child development a function of time. The events that make up the course of the child’s development emerge and unfold one after another over time with a robust definiteness and regularity. At a definite age, walking and speech develop; at another, the child attains the capacity for school learning. This link between the changes in the age of the child and the changes in his personality in the course of development is what is meant when it is said that development is not merely accomplished in time but is a function of time (Gesell¹) or that the properties of childhood are a function of age (Blonsky²).

But development is not a simple function of time, nor are the changes proportional to the quantity of years lived by the child. Changes in the course of development do not correspond directly to chronological time. Development is a complex function of time, linked to it by extremely peculiar, and highly volatile, complex dependencies. The course of child development in no way resembles the uniform and gradual movement of an hour hand over a clock face, measuring out time’s flow. The process of development is exemplified by the rhythmic or cyclical nature of the course it takes. It does not present itself in a single straight line but is more like a wave form, with ups and downs that may be taken as a symbol of the especial rhythmic character of this process, never flowing at the same tempo, but constantly revealing periods of quickening and slowing, intensifying and slackening, progressive and regressive movement.

Because of this, the temporal organization of child development turns out to be extremely complex; one year of development is never equal in its value to that of another year. The value of each year of development is defined by the place it occupies in the wave-like curve that we discussed previously. The growth in weight and height in the child from birth to 18 years was studied by Minot.³ He inserted into the diagram 30 vertical lines forming the length of period necessary for each 10% increase in weight. “These lines,” said Minot, “were in the beginning very closely adjacent to each other. One ten percent increment was followed by another in quick temporal succession. But eventually the interval indicated by the distance between the vertical lines lengthened. Our diagram is a simple graphic expression of the fact that the older we get, the greater the amount of time required for the growth of a given proportional magnitude will be.” (See Fig. 1.1., taken from Minot and Gesell–Trans.).

Fig. 1.1

Graphs of physical and mental growth

Gesell did the same in relation to the mental development of the child and established that in this area of development there exists a similar pattern.⁴ Comparing the monthly increase in intellectual development in the first year of life with the following annual increments up to 13 years, he found, as shown in the diagram, that one series in growth follows another. This leads us to the conclusion that during the first 12 years of life, any year starting from the second has the same value, in terms of its importance of development, as a corresponding month in the first year of life. He says, “In a chronological sense, a month is always equal to a month. But a month of intellectual age is derived from an organic cycle, and this month will vary enormously depending on its position in the developmental cycle, and moreover, the cycle is more like a spiral than a circle or an ellipse. In early childhood, one month may turn out to have been a decisive problem in the further development of the individual.”

The fact of the change of the tempo of development with age and the relative slowdown of the tempo of development with increasing age has been known for a long time. Richter⁵ said that from the infant to the speaking child is a bigger step than from the schoolchild to Newton. The same idea was expressed by Froebel.⁶ Tolstoy , the world-famous writer, in his old age spoke of the first years of his life: “Was it not then that I acquired all of which I now live, and gained so much so quickly that in the rest of my life I have not acquired even one hundredth as much? From the child of five to myself, only a step. From the newborn to the child of five, a terrible distance. From the embryo to the newborn, an abyss, and from non-existence to the embryo there is no longer an abyss, but the incomprehensible.”

In this way, in the economy of mental development, the value of a month is determined by its position in the cycle of life (Gesell ). This same law relates equally to any other aspect of the development of the child and to the development of the personality of the child as a whole. Therefore, these internal divisions of the process of child development do not coincide with a simple dividing up of the process of child development by chronological age, by the quantity of years lived. It is incorrect to suppose that a year of development in any one age is equivalent to a year of development in another age.

In this way, the division into age periods cannot be based on a simple chronological principle. Why is it that the flow of the process of development does not coincide with the flow of time? We have already said, in analyzing problems of child development, that child development cannot be taken as a process guided and determined by some sort of outside forces or factors. The process of child development is subordinate to its own, internal regularities. It flows as a dialectical process of self-movement. These inner regularities determine the circumstance that child development is not equivalent in the tempo, the rhythm, or the sequence of its autonomous movement to the astronomical flow of time.

We have already mentioned above that the process of child development is a process which is complex to the highest degree, which in its progressive movement changes in the intensity and rhythm of its course, which takes place in a disproportionate manner in relation to the various partial processes that make it up.

Some aspects of the personality of the child are developed disproportionately and unevenly. In development, there occurs a constant disruption of proportional progress, in the sense that at any one time a function which thus far has played in only one isolated area, which may have played only a very minor role, can advance to the first plane. It then remains for the course of a certain time the central point of the child’s activity and for a short time there occurs a remarkably rapid development. When this tumultuous time is past, a new area of function and interest will perform in the same way. Previously discovered areas, it stands to reason, continue to still develop. However, they do not do so in such a stormy way, but rather slowly within the overall framework of the personality—and, in this way, the child in each phase of his development presents a qualitatively new picture (Stern).

One of the basic laws of child development establishes the earlier maturation of basic organs and functions which alone permit the development of the higher types of activity in the child. “Therefore, the child learns to manage space much earlier than time. Knowledge of spatial forms is acquired before the knowledge of color. An eye for linear distance is acquired earlier than the ability to evaluate the distance of objects from us. Obligatory qualities are mastered earlier than nuances. Articulation in large joints develops earlier than articulation in delicate ones. Understanding speech develops earlier than voluntary speech. All of this is subject to the same law” (Stern ).

Like all processes of development, child development is made up of consecutive transitions from one stage to another stage , and, naturally, is divided into a number of separate, relatively closed, but interrelated cycles, epochs, or stages of development. The term “stage ” denotes a certain step in a given regular cycle (Gesell ). We come, in this way, to the concept of pedological age which, as we have seen, must be strictly distinguished from age in the chronological or passport sense. We might define pedological age as the epoch, cycle, or stage of development

• 1. Which is linked with preceding and with subsequent epochs of development

• 2. The value of which is determined by its place in the overall developmental cycle

• 3. In which the general laws of development are at all times given a unique qualitative expression

In this sense, the age stages of development may be compared with historical stages or epochs of human development, with evolutionary epochs in the development of organic life, or with geological epochs in the history of development of the earth. In the transition from one age stage to another, there arise new formations that did not exist in preceding periods, restructuring and modifying the course of development itself. In this way, the development of the child consists of nothing but a continuous transition from one age stage to another, linked to the change and construction of the personality of the child. In this sense, it is said that development is subordinate to age, and that in all types of development, even the most unusual, the change of observed phenomena is subject to regularities of age (Gesell ). Therefore, to study child development means to study the child’s transition from one age stage to another and the changes in his personality within each age period which occur under certain sociohistorical conditions. This is, for the pedology of age, the task at hand.

As we have seen, the division of the whole process of child development into separate age stages according to internal laws of development can never coincide with the partitioning of the child’s passport age, with the chronologically defined periods of his life. If we divide the whole period of child development covering the first 10 years of his life into different intervals of 1, 2, 3, years, etc., we will never get real periods of child development. However, there are, determined by internal laws, regularities linking the age level of development and the chronological age of the child. This means that each pedological age happens within chronologically defined boundaries, that is, it covers certain definite years in the life of the child. These chronological boundaries of each age vary depending on the historical epoch, on the social conditions of development, and on the individual characteristics of the child. They, in this way, present in themselves historically conditional values, changing in the course of the historical development of humanity.

We said earlier that the passport, or the chronological age of the child, may not coincide with his pedological age. Children who are the same in their passport age, that is, who have lived the same quantity of years, are at different stages in their age development. Kremiton⁷ investigated nearly 4000 boys from a physiological point of view and found that at age 14, only a third of them had already gone through sexual maturation, while another third was just within the period of sexual maturation, and another third was still not in this period. The same thing was found by these researchers in thousands of children with respect to teething. Burt⁸ made an analogous study of psychological development in 32,000 children from age three to fifteen. His studies showed that among children with a chronological age of 11, only 30.6% of the cases of 11-year-olds were at their pedological age. Twenty-nine percent were 10 years old, 10.9% at 9 years, 17.7% at 12 years, and 6.2% at 13 years. This discrepancy between the passport and the real age is due in each case to individual variations in development of the child. Children who are born on one and the same day, in one and the same hour, and at one and the same minute, will not develop in strict accordance with each other, like watch mechanisms timed to the minute, due to the fact that highly complex organismic processes of development can determine this or that deviation in individual cases, depending on the totality of the conditions of development. For this reason, some will be ahead of others in their development, while others will be left behind. Therefore, the first and basic task of practical pedology must be the determination of the real pedological age of the child, that is, the stage actually reached in the course of his development, and the degree of deviation between the real age and the passport age of the child determined by the quantity of years that have elapsed from his birth. Knowing the real pedological development of the child aids the pedagogue in implementing an individual approach to the pupil.