r/ the democracy jumped out

While reading Tool and Symbol, something that really stood out to me was that Vygotsky mentions how the differences between human children and anthropoids are initially only quantitative owing to the basic abilities that extremely young kids possess with respect to thinking about things beyond their visual fields. As time passes, kids tend to surpass apes, as they are able to create cliches and templates for situations within their minds, that find application in other similar situations too. Here, we begin to see that an ape given a stick to poke out some fruit from a tree will only be able to do so in that situation. Beyond it, there is little scope for it to apply the same actions because of the way that other visual field may be structured.

   

The monkey Kanzi, who was a hot topic last class, is a ledge (AKA legend), but I think that external rewards pump her up to talk to humans that she probably wants to hurt. Shoutout to cats and dogs too.

Such differences seem to form the basis of social constructivism. This pedagogical method applied within classrooms as a way to create knowledge and solve issues in a balanced manner. The social capacities of humans, which render them as qualitatively different from apes, were what helped us become more than just "animals that can't climb, run, and have bad teeth", like Michael often says. When these are embedded into the construction of learning environments, results can be prolific when the methods used are correct. In a capitalist society based on competition, and the perpetuation of competing social and political agendas within educational settings, the use of democratic processes that allow unbridled social constructivism are often considered to be "poisonous". This is an exaggeration that is probably coming from watching too much Arrested Development, where Michael Bluth makes fun of his sister for sending her daughter to a 'democratic feel-goodery' that will 'poison her opinions'.

Michael: Oh, great. That sounds like another one of those gradeless, structureless, new age feel-gooderies.

Lindsay: They teach self-expression and getting in touch with feelings, Michael. I mean, I know you don’t have any.

G.O.B.: The boy who couldn’t cry.

Buster: He’s a robot!

Lindsay: Michael can cry. He just doesn’t want to rust.

Tobias: Yes, he’s like the steel man from The Wizard From Oz.

While this is an attempt at dry humor, one can really look into the fact that such opinions only arise from the monopolization of society. These societal processes make us 'steel men'. or rather 'tin men' who are reticent to share with one another. Constructivism, when used in a democratic way, is able to create iterative feedback loops that are distributed and encourage more epistemic individuation.

We are all too reticent to share. Don't be a "steel man".

When we relate these things back to Vygotsky, we understand how the things that make us who we are developmentally as humans are often kept away from education in favor of top-down, instrumental processes that do not require the co-construction that Vygotsky, or even Dewey (albeit in a more evolutionary manner) says allows true learning and the evolution of perspectives. Since the source of new information for Vygotsky comes through mediation from the cultural overworld, why don't we encourage more collective processes that allow us to use our social capacity to thrive? The cultural presuppositions that make up the top down processes in education are probably the reason.