Would Vygotsky agree that young children are essentially egocentric?

Vygotsky started studying children around the same time as Piaget, but

Vygotsky’s understanding only borrowed from Piaget. For example, in the simplest

terms, Piaget believed that children were egocentric because they appeared to have very

little interest in the people around them when they played. Vygotsky, on the other hand,

believed differently. He believed that children were using egocentric speech, but were

not essentially egocentric.

In an article on Vygotsky’s theory, Blunden quotes Vygotsky, “…the true direction

of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the

social to the individual.” (Blunden, 1997 ) Believing that the child is taking information

and using it to understand the surrounding world, would suggest that the child is a part of

a larger system, and not simply and individual. The Zone of Proximal Development

(ZPD), by Vygotsky was one way that Vygotsky allowed for understanding of how

children learned from people other than themselves. Children learn through thought and

speech. The child uses egocentric speech to help understand their environment at first, but

this speech fades away to internal speech, or thoughts, used to guide any further learning.

This is in contradiction to Piaget’s view of the egocentric speech as a Pre-operational

stage where the stage is replaced by a Concrete operational stage. The child, to control

impulses and behaviour, uses this internal dialogue as a social functioning tool. These

two characteristics of internal speech would, in fact, state that Vygotsky does not believe

that children are essentially egocentric.

References:

Blunden, Andy, (1997), Vygotsky and the Dialectical Method. Retrieved October 15,

2006, from

http://gfdl.marxists.org.uk/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/vygotsk1.htm