Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Alexander R. Luria 157
self-administered “spoken commands.” A child’s speech ultimately possesses the function of
the adult and becomes internalized as its semantic properties are recognized. The child has
internalized facilitating/coaching and learned to “talk to [itself]” through the steps of problem
solving. The speech pattern emerges in response to a situation involving difficulties. Then it
develops as a plan. There are, of course, individual differences in problem solving—in the
internalization of reasoning skills.
Attention to the facilitating characteristics of coaching and the social environment become very
important in education, particularly in education involving social change. This relates directly
to concepts of scaffolding. Leontiev writes, “In society humans do not simply find external
conditions to which they adapt their activity. Rather, these (external) social conditions convey
within them the motives and goals of their activity, its means and needs. In a word, society
produces the activity of the individuals that it forms” (1981). In a post-9/11 global society this
relationship between society and the production of individuals becomes particularly poignant and
intense.
Relatively little is known about cross-cultural transhistorical learning spaces. Emphasis was on
differentiation between preliterate and industrialized people. Very important is to look for how
different cultures organize learning experiences for their young people and how that organization
facilitates or collides with schooling. This awareness would, for example, facilitate student,
teacher, and parent collaboration in learning. The “play of culture” activity has a number of
implications for educational psychology.
Historical changes in the social culture and environment influence what is important in the
curriculum of schooling. Let us try some broad examples. There will be large differences of what
one needs to sustain life in the “colonial household” as opposed to the “turn-of-the century 1900
household,” on television historical reality shows. In these dramatized cameos of social reality,
labor and culture seen historically, the nature of labor, and survival skills vary dramatically
between “then” and “now.” Thus the implications of language are quite different just as social
culture continues to change. With an age of technology the educative function of popular culture
increases. As social culture alters, attention needs to be directed to newer channels. The classroom
then can become a cultural/psychological laboratory. Gender, class, and ethnic identity can be
better understood within the spin of the historical dynamic of intelligence and social culture.
Examples of transhistoric learning space can be informative. For example 9/11 is transparently
symptomatic of significant cultural collisions, which can be understood in terms of the past,
present, and future. The status and role of women in Islamic countries can change the social
configurations, the learning spaces, of numbers of people across the globe. China offers a similar
example of global cultural collision and change. In a cartoon series in Hong Kong one of the
most frequent subjects is the overorganization of education for very young children, giving them
no time to be with their parents. At the time they are losing Chinese culture, they are struggling
in Western culture and seeming to inherit loneliness and dislocation. Another example occurred
in one of my film classes, where the outcomes of an African American woman were very higher
in quality than in the other courses she was taking. The difference between her performance in
my course and in the others was identifiable in the bantering ordinary-language conversations the
two of us had. She was the first person from her family to attend college. She was from a very oral
culture. She related to film, popular culture, in my course. But her performance also developed
through casual coaching.
Our bantering conversation connected a somewhat familiar subject matter, film, with a new way
of thinking, analytical criticism. Survival on the streets privileges “street smarts,” a canny ability
to quickly evaluate people and situations, to read character and action. These social skills draw
upon the same intellectual skills used for critical humanities interpretation like analytic criticism,
but humane facilitating can define the activity and make connections between intellect and