School Eduction

In an essay on the psychological ideas of LS. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria summarize some of the specific features of clasroom education :

School education is qualitatively differnt from education inthe broad sense. At school thhe child is faced with a particular task: to grasp the bases of scieentific studies, i.e., a system of scientific conceptions.

In the process of school education the child starts off from what have become his own complex generalizations and significances; but he does not so much proceed from them, asproceed onto a new path together with them, onto the path of intellectual analysis, comparison, unification, and establishment of logical realtions. He reasons, following then explanations given to him and then reproducing new, for him, logical operations of transition from one generalization to other generalizations. The early concepts that have been built inn the child in the process of living and which were assisted by rapport with his social environment(Vygotsky called them "everyday" or"spontaneous" concepts, spontaneous in the sense that they are formed aside from ant process specially aimed at mastering them) are now switched to a new process, to a new specially cognitive relationship to the world, and so in this process the child's concepts are transformed and thier structure changes. In the development of a child's consciousness the grasping of then bases of a science-system of concepts now takes the lead.

Vygotsky (1978, P.130)