Excerpt - Society versus Context in Individual DevelopmentTolman, C. (1999). Society versus context in individual development: Does theory make a difference? In Engestrom, Y, Miettenin, R., & Punamaki, R. (eds.) Perspectives on Activity Theory. NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 73-75 ...it is precisely in the collective nature of labor that consciousness emerges in its distinctly human form. (Leontiev, p. 207, 1959/1981) Leontiev distinguished two kinds of experience in animals: The second kind of experience is one that evolves gradually and achieves a highly refined and effective state in "higher" animals. But this ability must be correctly understood: The basic functions performed in animals by the mechanisms of the forming of the individual experience consists, moreover, in the adaptation of species behavior to variable elements of the environment. (1959/1981, p. 420) Although most Anglo-American theories of human psychological development take this kind of learning to be the ontogenetic task of the child, Leontiev insists that this is not the case. Development cannot be fully understood in terms of the acquisition of adaptive behavior. The task for the human child is different because the information required for human existence is different: it is societal information. This kind of information cannot be learned in the way that animals learn to adapt to the changing demands of their external worlds; it must be appropriated, reflecting an evolutionary new process linked to the new societal nature of the human species. Leontiev defines appropriation as "mastering ... the experience accumulated by mankind in the course of social history"(1959/1981, p. 419). It is not reducible to biological adaptation or to any form of adapted behavior, but supersedes adaptation as a specifically human mode of dealing with and living in the world. Unlike adaptation, appropriation "results in the individual's reproduction of historically formed human capacities and functions" and "the capacities and functions formed ... in the course of this are psychological new formations"(Leontiev, 1959/1981, p. 296). It is a developmental process in which the individual is drawn into societal practice; at the same time, it is a societal process by which new "psychological formations" are developed. Consider a child learning to drive nails with a hammer. Is it merely learning responses? Is it merely learning to adapt to the demands of the wood, the nails, or the hammer? The child is learning responses and is learning to adapt to demands, but not merely. The hammer, like all objects made by human beings, from the simplest implements to the computer, embodies meaning, the accumulated historical experience of the society into which the child is born, and it is this above all that the child is acquiring. It is the knowledge of making things and of the need to do so, of the utility of wood, of the functions of nails and hammers. The child is appropriating societal experience. And given that human society is characterized by a complex division of labor, the child is also acquiring the possibility of entering the productive life of society. At the same time, the child is being integrated into a process in which its own practice will create new ways of carpentering, thus altering the accumulated body of societal meanings that the succeeding generation will appropriate. None of this applies to the rat learning to press a lever in a Skinner box. Consider one further aspect of learning to use a hammer. Can the child learn from the hammer itself, as animals learn directly from the demands of their environments? Is it the world of objects from which the child learns to speak a language, to read, and to develop other cognitive skills. Surely not! There is always another human being in the picture. It is a function of adults and older children to teach younger ones to do these things. This function becomes institutionalized in families, schools, and other cultural organizations precisely because the child cannot learn simply by interacting on its own with the world of objects. It was this sort of thinking that was expressed in Vygotsky's term zone of proximal development. Too often, however, it has been interpreted simply as a way in which the teacher can aid the learning of a pupil. This completely misses its theoretical intent, which is to reveal the essentially societally mediated nature of human learning. Engstrom comes closer to the mark when he describes this zone as the "distance between the everyday actions of individuals and the historically new form of the societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double bind potentially embedded in ...everyday actions" (1987, p. 174). The conclusion, it appears to me, is inescapable: At its heart, human ontogeny is a uniquely human, societal process of appropriating historical experience in the form of actions and meanings.
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