"I Have a Brother But My Brother Doesn't!"

[kellogg]

J-La Belle's homework is from the END of Section One. Most people haven't done their Chapter Six homework (even though we've had TWO WEEKS to work on it). So I'm going to summarize a little and then finish it up.

LSV has been explaining that Piaget has made three BIG mistakes. He turns each one on its head, and so makes a working hypothesis to test.

Piaget says that only the child’s SPONTANEOUS concepts (not his academic concepts) reflect child thinking. LSV turns this upside down. He hypothesizes that BOTH the child’s spontaneous concepts AND his academic concepts reflect child thinking.

Piaget says that spontaneous concepts are academic concepts do not influence each other and do not complete each other. LSV turns this upside down. He hypothesizes that they do.

Piaget says that the child develops by “socializing” his thinking: academic concepts drive out everyday concepts the way that adding wine to a bottle of milk will eventually drive out the milk. LSV turns this upside down. He hypothesizes that academic concepts and everyday concepts create a single, unified system that “sets aside” the qualities of both and preserves the qualities of both. Then he says…

LSV: Now, you notice that ALL of these assumptions, both our and Piaget’s rest on another assumption: that everyday concepts and academic concepts really are different in some important way. Suppose they are really the same thing. Concepts are concepts. That’s what the behaviorists say…

K-Dragon: It’s also what Whole Language teachers say!

LSV: That’s strange. Well, if they are right, then all of our research is really pointless. If there is no difference between everyday concepts and spontaneous concepts, then there can’t be any “relationship” to understand. Identity is identity; it’s not a relationship.

K-Dragon: So what makes you think that they are different?

LSV: Well, we really had four different sets of reasons for thinking this. But I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. Perhaps J-La Belle and Ha-ha Smile can explain!

J-La Belle: I’ll try. The first reasons are purely PRACTICAL and EMPIRICAL, formed by DIRECT experience in learning and teaching. The way that the concepts are formed are different. The motives for their formation are different. So the relationship with the child’s experience is quite different.

Ha-ha Smile: What about the strengths and weaknesses that we talked about earlier?

J-La Belle: Exactly! Take for example the concept of “brother” and the concept of “Archimedes’ law”.

Ha-ha: Wait a minute. Which one is an academic concept and which one is an everyday concept?

J-La Belle: ‘Brother’ is an everyday concept and ‘Archimedes’ law’, the idea that the force keeping a ship on the water is equal to the weight of the water it displaces, is an academic concept. Now, the weird thing is that the child can define “Archimedes’ law” better than the child can define “brother”. If you ask the child about Archimedes law he will say something like “it says that the force that keeps a ship up is the same as the weight of the water it displaces” or “it’s a force equal to the weight displaced by a floating object”. But if you ask him to define “brother” he will just tell you a story about how his brother teases him all the time and then tells his mother lies and if you ask him whether his brother has a brother he will say "no". This is because the two are learned in different ways. The idea of “brother” is learned from concrete experience told to a teacher, and the idea of Archimedes’ law comes from the explanation of a teacher told to himself.

Ha-ha: OK. Got it. Now, what is the SECOND group of reasons for distinguishing between academic and everyday concepts?

J-La Belle: Well, they are kind of theoretical. Some theoreticians say that children don’t learn by assimilation or by imitation.

Ha-ha: Who, for example?

J-La Belle: Well, Stern says kids don’t simply imitate or assimilate the speech of others; what they say is very different, quite unique and specific with its own laws and grammar. So it appears that you can’t explain the child’s learning of language by imitation or literal assimilation.

Ha-ha Smile: And does Piaget agree with that?

J-La Belle: Oh, Piaget goes farther. Stern just talks about the originality of the child’s speech, but Piaget says the child’s thinking is even more original. He says that in practice the child’s thinking must be a lot more original and creative than his speech, because the role of imitation and thinking is so much less in thinking than in speech. You can imitate a word, but to imitate a thought is not so easy!

Ha-ha: So the child COMPLETELY remakes the academic concept? Like when you give a child an English word and he thinks ENTIRELY in Korean, or when you give the child the word “continent” and he thinks of a big yellow spot on the map marked “Russia”?

J-La Belle: Yes, according to Piaget. But not according to Vygotsky.

Ha-ha Smile: If the child has to re-elaborate the academic concept, doesn’t he just make it look exactly like an everyday concept? You know, like when the teacher says “a two-generation family” and the child just thinks “my teacher and her dad” or “one parent family”.

J-La Belle: Well, no. It’s not like biological adaptation, where one species replaces another. It’s more like cultural development, where a city is built on top of, or even right out of, the ruins of another city. The academic concept gets built ON TOP OF the everyday concept.

Ha-ha: Can you give me an analogy?

J-La Belle: Vygotsky says that the relationship between the everyday concept and the academic concepts is essentially like the relationship between the foreign language and the mother tongue. You know, the foreign language doesn’t REPLACE the mother tongue. And in the same way the everyday concept is not replaced by the academic concept. Instead, they influence each other: The mother tongue certainly influences the way we use foreign language words! And learning a foreign language ALSO influences the way we speak our mother tongue. In the same way, everyday concepts and academic concepts must influence each other on an ongoing basis, contrary to what Piaget says. Besides, the process of developing science concepts is intrinsically different, it develops under different conditions—just like the development of native language and foreign language concepts.  

Ha-ha Smile: How is that similar to learning science concepts?

J-La Belle: Spontaneous concepts have a speech-meaning side too you know.  They develop through the development of word meanings, just as native language words do. The two relationships (that between everyday concepts and academic concepts and that between mother tongue and foreign language) both depend on the learning of new elements. But in addition, learning a foreign language depends a lot on knowing your native language, just as learning academic concepts depends a lot on your everyday experience of things. And…just as learning science concepts raises the everyday thinking to a new level, learning foreign language words can raise your native language use to a new level too! It’s a little like learning higher mathematics, which transforms the way you think about arithmetic!

Ha-ha: So let me get this straight. Foreign languages are a kind of ALGEBRA?

J-La Belle: That’s what Vygotsky says. But in some ways foreign language learning is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than algebra. You see, in algebra, the child learns that arithmetic is really just ONE possible kind of numerical relationship, an that others are possible. We can replace every instance of a concrete quantity with a variable, like “x” or “y” and we will still get true equations.

Ha-ha Smile: I get it. With foreign language learning the child learns something even more important: the relationship between object and word in the only ONE possible kind of language relationship, and others are possible. We can replace every foreign or native language word with another word, and still get true sentences. But why is this MORE important?

J-La Belle: I think it’s because the child learns that concepts are not the same thing as words. Although we make concepts with words, and we share concepts with words, they actually transcend words. Different languages have different words for the same concept. But you can only really see this if you learn foreign languages.

Ha-ha Smile: So what is the THIRD group of reasons for making the distinction between everyday concepts and academic concepts.

J-La Belle: It’s your turn!

Ha-ha Smile: Well, I think the third group of reasons is HEURISTIC. But I’m not sure what heuristic means. I guess it means something like “interpretative”. Sort of like the qualitative research plans that our classmates are doing for Professor Kim Hyeri.

J-La Belle: For example?

Ha-ha Smile: Well, remember that at the beginning of Chapter Five, Vygotsky talks about TWO different kinds of research on concept formation.

J-La Belle: Yes, there were the “product” studies and the “process” studies. So what?

Ha-ha Smile: And you remember that Vygotsky had his own study? Well, now he wants to use the distinction between everyday concepts and academic concepts to interpret that study—the artificial concept study with the blocks “mur”, “cev”, “lag” and “bik”.

J-La Belle: So what were the artificial concepts? Were they everyday concepts or were they academic concepts?

K-Dragon: They were NEITHER. But they were close to academic concepts, for THREE reasons. First of all, they were learned in a specially organized environment. Secondly, they belong to a kind of system. Thirdly, they child got "help" from the experimenter. 

J-La Belle: I get it. Now, what is the FOURTH group of reasons for making this distinction?

K-Dragon: Well, the fourth group consists of PRACTICAL considerations. Concepts, as we saw in Chapter Five, are not simply mental habits, and academic concepts cannot be taught as academic habits. By uncovering the very complex relations between learning academic concepts and forming habits, it becomes possible to further elaborate the distinction between everyday learning on the one hand and classroom learning on the other in classroom practice.

Vygotsky concludes by comparing the development of a concept like “brother” and the development of a concept like that of “exploitation”, and asks if they follow the same path or different ones. If it is the same path, how can we account for the differences? If they follow different ones, what is the RELATIONSHIP between the two paths?

[jihye]

Thanks for translating my words in English ! I am wondering, is it okay to understand 'spontaneous' and 'everyday concept 'is same?

[kellogg]

Oh, I mostly do the translation for ME, La Belle. To make sure that I understand (and I DON'T always). For some reason, when I read in a foreign language, I have to ARTICULATE the voice of the written speech much more explicitly. I can't read silently and quickly the way you do. But I find I have a lot to say about "spontaneous" and "everyday concepts", so I'd better write something separately.