Key+Players+-+Tom

Key Players: Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget kept a strict daily schedule, arising at 4 a.m. to write, then on to teach his classes. At lunch he would walk, and he read extensively in the evening.

Born in Switzerland in 1896, Piaget was a scientific child prodigy. At age eleven he was writing biology articles for science journals. He kept is age secret because some believed his young age undermined his credibility.

Piaget graduated from Neuchatel University in 1916, and earned his doctorate in 1918. In the ensuing years he studied epistemology, and psychology, and then worked on standardized reasoning tests with Simon Binet.

In his work on these tests he developed his belief that you learn more from children by examining their thinking process, especially on those answers that are **technically incorrect**.This was the beginning of his work on how children learn.

Jerome Bruner introduced Piaget's ideas to America after they were translated in the 1950's. At this time American education was focused on teaching kids to think. This Piaget's ideas were favored over those behaviorists, or the stimulus-response theory of learning.

Key Players: Lev Vygotsky
Born in 1896 in Tsarist Russia, Vygotsky won a place at the University of Moscow in the Jewish lottery. The humanities courses at Moscow weren't enough, so he went to Staniavsky University to study history and psychology. He graduated from both universities in 1917.

After graduation, Vygotsky returned to his hometown, Gomel, Belarus, to teach high school. He developed into a leading thinker in his local environment.

He delivered a speech at the Second Psychological Congress in Leningrad on 6 January 1924. Subsequently he was invited by Alexander Luriais to join the research team at the Moscow Institute of Psychology.

Over the next ten years Vygotsky published, worked with displaced refugees and in clinics with physically and mentally handicapped people. He believed in the Russian Revolution and endeavored to forward it's ideals.

Vygotsky died of tuberculosis in 1934.

His works were published after 1934, but suppressed in 1936. They were not known in the west until 1958.

Vygotsky's ideas have been accepted as agreeing in great measure with the theories of Piaget, but developed independently and simultaneously.

Vygotsky also created what is now called the Vygotsky Circle. This was a group of intellectuals who met and corresponded to discuss the sciences of brain, mind, and behavior. This conversation formed the foundation of what what later called the integrative science of cultural-historical psychology.

Lev Vygotsky's life had been hidden from the west behind Soviet Union's distance which developed in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Vygotsky seemed to have been a person who operated initially within his hometown and it's immediate environs. He taught high school, led local discussion groups, worked in clinics with mentally and physically impaired people. All of this experience was not lost, for he followed his ideas methodically and was able to publish works that attracted some of the leading Soviet scientists of the day. After his death his works were widely distributed until 1936 when the Stalin regime clamped down. The fact that Vygotsky's ideas flourished in the west after being translated in 1958 indicates that his ideas were innovative and seminal to modern conceptions of human thought, language, learning and behavior during the post-revolution era.