[this fragment is part of an exploration of a theory of sociability building on 'ignorance' rather than knowledge]
One of the most fateful statement in educational theory may have been Dewey's assertion that "Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary" (1959 [1897]). Dewey did not specify what kind of psychology he had in mind to identify "the psychological structures" he is postulating, but he gave a definite impetus not only to psychological researchers but also to pedagogues. The statement makes so much sense that it is all the harder to challenge as it has become institutionalized
It may be the case that all children move through a series of developmental stages. It does not matter whether one follows Freud, Piaget or Vygotsky, the frameworks remain the same and can easily be presented as fulfilling Dewey's mandate to psychology and to the pedagogical policy making. The success of "constructivism" in recent years as a version of Vygotsky has fully entered pedagogical and curricular investigation, is but another case of a long series of transfers.
I propose we reopen the question of the logic of such transfers. I propose that it may not be the case that adults addressing children, particularly teachers in schools, must attempt to transform their own practices with children with the specific goal of making these practices available to children "at their own levels." Of course, all adults have always changed their speech and interactional practices when dealing with children, particularly infants and babies. Forms of baby talk are universal. However, there are many different forms of babytalk, and even more ways of incorporating slightly older children into multitudes of "speech communities" within which these children move more or less rapidly from "peripheral" to "full" participation (in Lave and Wenger's vocabulary, 1991). One implication might be to reverse the priority Dewey gave to psychology over sociology as the issue becomes the organization of these communities (classrooms, but also any number of related settings in 'families' and 'communities').
I am not necessarily criticizing here the fundamental work that suggests that children's thinking 'develop' through stages more or less incommensurate to each other. It may indeed be the case that 'children do not think like adults'. I am suggesting, rather that pedagogical theorizing has used this plausible generalization far beyond what should have happened.
The issue concerns not the 'best' way of reaching children at any particular stage, but the means by which children at any stage are made to participate in joint activities with other people (other children, adolescents or adults). It is obviously the case that for most of human history, and even now in most settings, children become part of social events that are not specifically planned for them. These are events, say a family picnic, that are not specifically designed in terms of specific ("scientific") understandings of the various children stages if development. Not that the parents in the group may have various ideas about "how children are like." Not that the adolescents in the group may have still other ideas. What is probably the case is that, unless the parents are developmental psychologists, and perhaps not even then, there will be little organized attempt to talk to the children in a way regulated at a distance by legitimate experts. In many ways, a family picnic might be analogizes to a one-room school house ruled by a young woman with little training, or a 'family day-care center' run by a middle-aged woman for her neighbors.
It is certainly the case that we have become used to see such informal arrangements as far from the "best" and much public policy has been designed to bring these settings under the control of the experts. But we should still wonder about the evidence that these arrangements 'work'--even if it is the case that they are not optimal, and I am not sure I want to grant this. Generations of parents and siblings have brought children into their various communities of local practice. Minimally, it must be recognized that adult ignorance about developmental stages does not seem to have prevented most children in their care to become adults. Something else is going on in the relationships between adults and children that stage theories of individual development do not seem to handle well.
In brief I am calling for an expanded view of Vygotsky more social understanding of development that would focus less on the "zones of proximal development" (1986) and more on the social systems that open and close these zones.