LEV VYGOTSKY

What a child can do in cooperation today, he can do alone tomorrow.

Somehow our society has formed a one-sided view of the human personality, and for some reason everyone understood giftedness and talent only as it applied to the intellect. But it is possible not only to be talented in one's thoughts but also to be talented in one's feelings as well.

A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action.

Love can reach the same level of talent, and even genius, as the discovery of differential calculus.

In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

A mind cannot be independent of culture.

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone

What a child can do today with assistance, she will be able to do by herself tomorrow.

It is through others that we become ourselves.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

It may be said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment personally change their behavior, subjugating it to their control.

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.

There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.

The true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the social, but from the social to the individual.

The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.

Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child's development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development

Thought is not merely expressed in words, it comes into existence through them

Psychology teaches us at every step that though two types of activity can have the same external manifestation, whether in origin or essence, their nature may differ most profoundly.

In play, the child is always behaving beyond his age, above his usual everyday behaviour; in play he is, as it were, a head above himself. Play contains in a concentrated form, as in the focus of a magnifying glass, all developmental tendencies; it is as if the child tries to jump above his usual level.