Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes

Vygotsky was a product of the Soviet system, a full-on Marxist, and also a Jew. A hazardous combination, but the quality of his thinking, his lucid insights and innovations, his sheer creativity, all make this book important for anyone interested in educational psychology. The man was a ground-breaker.

This book is well worth reading. Vygotsky's work was brilliant, but most sources completely misrepresented it, so it's worth reading the original. This translation is very readable too. Our schools would be much better if this were consistently applied.People will nit about the faithfulness of different translations, but for the typical practitioner or education researcher, I'm not sure it matters too much. The textbook summaries of Vygotsky are almost all simply incorrect, and it's important to get away from that. On the other hand, the differences in nuance between translations are subtle enough to have little practical impact (unless, of course, one's goal is to study Vygotsky, in which case, one is best off learning Russian).

This book is very interesting and was somehow a mind opener for me. The book gives a good overview of the different approaches to the learning process which were available and discussed at the time. He explains the childs development not as simply a Newtonian deterministic process, but as mental and psychological processes in motion and change where the outcome often became different what had been predicted. It is amazing that Vygotsky could come up with these new and visionary ideas in Stalin`s Sovjet!

This reissue of a 1978 reprint is supposedly a collection of Russian psychologist Vygotsky's essays (he died in 1934) as translated from the Russian by A.R. Luria, one of his students. The "editors" claim that after a cursory study of Luria's translations "we came to believe that the image of Vygotsky as a sort of early neobehaviorist of cognitive development - an impression held by many of our colleagues- was strongly belied by these two works." Nice. A cursory study is able to strong belie widely held impressions that are based on decades of studying Vygotsky's own 1934 book Thought and Language, among his other works. One has to wonder at the degree to which revisionism is taking place when the editors state in the preface: "In putting separate essays together we have taken significant liberties. The reader will encounter here not a literal translation of Vygotsky but rather our edited translation of Vygotsky from which we have omitted material that seemed redundant and to which we have added material that seemed to make his points clearer." Hmmmm. Will the real Vygotsky please stand up! Save your money and first get Kozulin's version of "Thought and Language." One must question the amount of trustworthy scholarship in "Mind in Society."

Vygotsky was a genius! If you work with children or simply want to better understand human development I highly recommend this book. He blazed the trail with his theories, many of which are standard practice for early educators.

There always a need to do quick understanding of leaner learning ability. So this is a required book together with others.

Very nice book

This book, being the seminal work that it is, will be a good addition to any educator's library.

Seminar

This book arrived very swiftly in great condition. I found it very useful for coursework and its size makes it easy to carry around during study. Very pleased all round.

As is so often the case, it is so illuminating to read the 'original' rather than hand-me-down versions in more recent texts. This is especially true of Vygotsky whose true alignment to Piaget's theorizing is too easily overlooked and simplified. Reading this book corrects a lot of impressions.

The book that every psychologist should read. Sets the scene brilliantly and in an easy to follow text. A must.

Excellent book